UC-NRLF 


B    3    57^    2ST 


i 


^  James  Ik.  riDoffitt 

L/lM^ /z..:. /...i.t:.:... 


No. 


PAULINE  FORE  MOFFITT 
LIBRARY 

UNIVERSITY  OF  G^.LIFORNIA 
GENERAL  LIBRARY,  BERKELEY 


> 


T 


ENNYSON 


1bl0  art  an^  IRelation 
to  riDobcrn  Xife 


STOPFORD  A.^ROOKE,  M.A. 


G.  P.  PUTNAM'S   SONS 

NEW    YORK  LONDON 

97   WEST  TWENTV-THIRD   STREET  24   BEDFORD   STREET,  STRAND 

C^e  Ilmtkerbochtr  |)re38 
iyo3 


Copyright,  1894 

BY 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 


^f^  ^7Aff 


Zbe  fmtoherbocher  ipreas,  t\ew  ^otrt 


CONTENTS 


9^5^ 


Introduction 

I.  Tennyson  as  an  Artist     . 
II.  His  Relation  to  Christianity    . 
III.  His  Relation  to  Social  Politics 

CHAP. 

I.  The  Poems  of  1830     . 
II.  The  Poems  of  1833 

III.  The  Poems  of  1842     . 

IV.  The  Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of 

1842  with  the  later  Classical  Poems 

V.  The  Princess 

VI.  The     Princess    {Cont?) — The     Woman' 
Question 

VII.  In  Memoriam      ..... 

VIII.  In  Memoriam  {Cont.) — Its  Structure 
IX.  Maud  and  the  War-Poems 

X.  Idylls  of  the  King  .... 
"•v   The  Coming  of  Arthur    . 
Gareth  and  Lynette 


PAGB 
I 

2 
13 

49 
73 
9Z 

no 

145 

169 

188 

212 
229 

268 


997 


IV 


Contents 


X.  Idylls  of  the  King — (Cont.) 
The  Marriage  of  Geraint 
Geraint  and  Enid 
Balin  and  Balan 
Merlin  and  Vivien  . 
Lancelot  and  Elaine 
i^  The  Holy  Grail 
Pelleas  and  Ettarre 
The  Last  Tournament 
Lancelot 
^'  Guinevere 

The  Passing  of  Arthur 
XL  Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry 
XI L  Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook 

XIII.  The  Dramatic  Monologues 

XIV.  Speculative  Theology     . 
XV    The  Nature-Poetry 

XVI.  The  Later  Poems 

Index   


282 

291 
298 
312 
319 

341 
350 
357 
370 
392 
412 

431 
448 
469 

487 

5" 


TENNYSON 

HIS    ART   AND    RELATION    TO 
MODERN   LIFE 


TENNYSON. 


INTRODUCTION. 

THE  death  of  Tennyson  was  worthy  of  his  life.  He 
died  with  the  simplicity  which  marked  his  life,  and 
yet  with  a  certain  conscious  stateliness  which  was 
all  his  own  ;  and  these  two,  simplicity  and  stateliness, 
were  also  vital  in  the  texture  of  his  poetry.  But  his 
dying  hour,  though  it  has  left  a  noble  picture  on  the 
mind  of  England,  is  not  the  important  thing.  His  life 
and  poetry  are  the  real  matter  of  use  and  interest,  and 
his  death  gains  its  best  import  from  its  being  the  beau- 
tiful and  fitting  end  of  all  the  work  that  had  gone  before 
it„  It  became  an  artist,  it  became  a  Christian,  it  became 
a  man.  To  these  three  points  this  Introduction  is  dedi- 
cated— to  his  Illation  to  beauty,  to  his  relation  to  the 
Christian  faith,  and  to  his  relaticn  to  the  movement  of  hu- 
manity. The  art  of  his  poems,  his  work  on  nature  and 
his  work  on  human  life,  as  far  as  this  immense  subject 

I 


2  Tennyson 

can  be  compressed  into  a  few  Inindred  pages,  will  be 
treated  of  in  the  rest  of  this  book.  For  more  than  sixty 
years  he  practised  his  art,  and  his  practice  of  it,  being 
original  and  extraordinarily  careful  and  self-respecting, 
suggests  and  comments  on  almost  every  question  that 
concerns  the  art  of  poetry.  For  more  than  sixty  years 
he  lived  close  to  the  present  life  of  England,  as  far  as 
he  was  capable  of  comprehending  and  sympathising  with 
its  movements  ;  and  he  inwove  what  he  felt  concerning 
it  into  his  poetry.  For  many  years  to  come  that  poetry 
— so  close  to  modern  life — will  open  a  vast  storehouse 
of  subjects  to  those  writers  who  are  interested  in  the 
application  of  imaginative  emotion  to  the  problems  and 
pleasures  of  life.  Half  at  least  of  those  problems  and 
pleasures  eluded  Tennyson,  or  he  did  not  see  them. 
But  he  felt  the  other  half  all  the  more  strongly,  and  he 
felt  it  for  this  long  period  of  sixty  years.  He  then  who 
writes  on  Tennyson  has  so  wide  a  country  over  which 
to  travel,  that  he  cannot  do  much  more  than  visit  it  here 
and  there.  When  he  has  finished  his  journey,  he  knows 
how  much  he  has  left  unseen,  untouched  ;  how  much 
more  of  pleasure  and  good  he  will  gain  in  many  more 
journeys  over  this  varied,  home-like,  and  romantic  land. 


Tennyson  as  an  Artist. — The  first  characteristic  of 
Tennyson's  art — that  is,  of  his  shaping  of  the  beauty 
which  he  saw  in  Nature  and  Humanity — was  simplicity, 
and    this    came    directly    out    of   his    character.      The 


Introduction  3 

way  in  which  he  worked,  his  choice  of  subjects,  his 
style,  were  all  the  revelation  of  a  character  drawn  on 
large  and  uncomplicated  lines  ;  and  in  this  sense,  in 
the  complete  sincerity  to  his  inner  being  of  all  he  did 
and  in  the  manner  of  its  doing,  he  was  simple  in  the 
truest  sense  of  the  word.  Nothing  was  ever  done  for 
effect  ;  no  subject  in  which  he  was  not  veritably  involved 
was  taken  up.  Nothing  was  even  tried,  save  a  few  metri- 
cal exercises,  for  experiment's  sake  alone,  much  less  to 
please  the  popular  moment.  The  thing  shaped  was  the 
legitimate  child  of  natural  thought  and  natural  feeling. 
Vital  sincerity  or  living  correspondence  between  idea 
and  form,  that  absolute  necessity  for  all  fine  art  as  for 
all  noble  life,  was  his,  and  it  is  contained  in  what  I  have 
called  his  simplicity. 

His  clearness  is  also  contained  in  this  simplicity — 
clearness  in  thought,  in  expression,  and  in  representa- 
tion of  the  outward  world,  one  of  the  first  and  greatest 
things  an  artist  can  attain.  It  is  true  that  Tennyson 
never  went  down  into  the  obscure  and  thorny  depths  of 
metaphysics  and  theology  ;  it  is  true  that  he  did  not  at- 
tempt to  express  the  more  dreadful  and  involved  passions 
of  mankind,  such  as  Shakespeare  in  his  Tragic  worked 
upon,  nor  the  subtle  and  distant  analogies  and  phases 
of  human  nature  in  which  Browning  had  his  pleasure. 
It  was  easy,  then,  it  may  be  said,  for  him  to  be  clear. 
But  I  think  it  was  not  from  inability  to  try  these  sub- 
jects that  he  did  not  write  about  them,  but  from  delib- 
erate choice  not  to  write  about  that  which  he  could  not 


4  Tennyson 

express  with  lucidity  of  thought  and  form.  He  deter- 
mined to  be  clear.  He  chose  plain  and  easy  lines  of 
thought  in  philosophy  and  theology,  but  he  expressed 
them  with  art — that  is,  in  beautiful  form  proceeding  out- 
wards from  impassioned  feeling  ;  and  a  poem  like  The 
Two  Voices  or  Out  of  the  Deep  is  an  instance  of  the  way 
this  was  done.  The  same  choice  of  the  easy  to  be  un- 
derstood presided  over  his  human  subjects.  For  the 
most  part  he  wrote  of  the  everyday  loves  and  duties  of 
men  and  women  ;  of  the  primal  pains  and  joys  of  hu- 
manity ;  of  the  aspirations  and  trials  which  are  com- 
mon to  all  ages  and  all  classes  and  independent  even 
of  the  disease  of  civilisation  ;  but  he  made  them  new 
and  surprising  by  the  art  which  he  added  to  them — 
by  beauty  of  thought,  tenderness  of  feeling,  and  ex- 
quisiteness  of  shaping.  The  main  lines  of  the  subjects, 
even  of  the  classical  subjects,  are  few,  are  simple,  are  clear. 
And  I  think  all  the  more  that  this  choice  of  clearness 
(of  clearness  as  a  part  of  simplicity)  was  deliberate,  be- 
cause of  his  representation  of  Nature.  It  is  plain  that 
he  might  have  entered  into  infinite  and  involuted  de- 
scription ;  that  he  could,  if  he  pleased,  have  expressed 
the  stranger  and  remoter  aspects  of  Nature,  for  he  had 
an  eye  to  see  everything  from  small  to  large.  But  he 
selected  the  simple,  the  main  lines  of  a  landscape  or  an 
event  of  Nature,  and  rejected  the  minuter  detail  or  the 
obscurer  relations  between  the  parts  of  that  which  he 
described.  What  was  done  was  done  in  the  fewest 
words  possible-  and  with  luminous  fitness  of  phrase. 


Introduction  5 

English  literature  owes  him  gratitude  for  this  clear- 
ness. At  a  time  when  we  are  running  close  to  the  edge 
of  all  the  errors  of  the  later  Elizabethans,  Tennyson 
never  allowed  himself  to  drift  into  obscurity  of  thought 
or  obscurity  of  expression,  and  showed  (as  those  did  not 
who  restored  clearness  to  English  song  in  the  time  of 
Dryden)  that  simplicity  of  words,  as  well  as  jewelled 
brightness  of  thought  and  description,  might  be  also 
compact  of  imagination.  The  lamp  of  language  which 
he  held  in  his  hand  burnt  with  a  bright,  keen,  and  glow- 
ing flame.  The  debt  we  owe  Tennyson  for  this  is  not 
owed  by  English  literature  alone  ;  it  is  personal  also. 
Every  writer  should  acknowledge  the  debt  and  follow 
the  example.  Clearness  in  thought  and  words  ought  to 
be  a  part  of  a  writer's  religion  ;  it  is  certainly  a  neces- 
sary part  of  his  morality.  Nay,  to  follow  clearness  like 
a  star,  clearness  of  thought,  clearness  of  phrase,  in  every 
kind  of  life,  is  the  duty  of  all.  But  the  poets  are  most 
bound  to  feel  and  fulfil  that  duty,  and  it  is  not  one  of 
the  least  which  belong  to  their  art  and  their  influence. 
Tennyson  felt  it  and  fulfilled  it. 

One  other  thing  I  may  briefly  add  to  these  judgments 
concerning  his  simplicity.  It  is  that  (after  his  very  earli- 
est work)  his  stuff  is  of  almost  an  equal  quality  through- 
out. I  do  not  mean  that  all  the  poems  are  equally  good, 
but  that  the  web  on  which  their  pattern  was  woven  kept, 
with  but  a  few  exceptions,  the  same  closeness  and  fine- 
ness throughout.  The  invention,  the  pictures,  the 
arrangement,  and  the  colouring  of    the  things  wrought 


6  Tennyson 

on  the  web  were  variable  in  excellence,  but  the  stuff 
was  uniform.  This  is  an  excessively  rare  excellence  in 
a  poet,  and  it  continued  to  the  close.  The  workman- 
Bhip  is  curiously  level  from  youth  to  age  ;  and  that  kind 
of  simplicity  has  also  its  root  in  character. 

Mingled  with  this  simplicity,  which  was  due  to  the 
unconscious  entrance  of  his  character  into  his  art,  there 
was  also  in  all  his  poetry,  as  I  have  said  with  regard  to 
his  death,  a  certain  stateliness  entirely  conscious  of  itself, 
and  arising  out  of  a  reverence  for  his  own  individuality. 
The  personality  of  Tennyson,  vividly  conscious  of  itself 
and  respecting  itself,  pervades  his  poetry,  is  part  of  his 
art,  and  gives  it  part  of  its  power.  I  have  called  it  self- 
respecting  to  distinguish  it  from  the  personality  of  those 
poets  who,  like  Byron,  spread  out  their  personality  be- 
fore us,  but  whom  we  cannot  suspect  of  reverencing 
themselves.  "  Reverencing  themselves  "  seems  an  in- 
vidious term,  but  in  the  case  of  poets  like  Tennyson, 
and  there  is  a  distinct  class  of  such  poets,  it  means  that 
they  look  upon  themselves  as  prophets,  as  endowed  with 
power  to  proclaim  truth  and  beauty,  as  consecrated  to 
do  work  which  will  delight,  console,  and  exalt  mankind. 
It  is,  then,  rather  their  high  vocation  which  they  rever- 
ence than  anything  in  themselves  ;  and  this  bestows  on 
all  their  work  that  stateliness  which  is  self-conscious,  as 
it  were,  in  all  their  poems.  They  are  never  seen  in  un- 
dress, never  without  their  singing  and  prophetic  robes, 
never  unattended  by  one  or  other  of  the  graver  Muses. 

We  have  had  two  great  examples  of  this  type  of  jjoet 


Introduction  *] 

in  the  past,  Milton  was  one,  Wordsworth  was  another. 
Milton  never  moved  his  verse  unconscious  of  Urania  by 
his  side.  Wordsworth  never  lost  the  sense  that  he  was  a 
consecrated  spirit.  And  Tennyson  never  forgot  that  the 
poet's  work  was  to  convince  the  world  of  love  and 
beauty  ;  that  he  was  born  to  do  that  work,  and  to  do  it 
worthily.  This  is  an  egotism  (if  we  choose  to  give  it 
that  term)  which  is  charged  with  power  and  with  fire. 
Any  individuality,  conscious  of  itself,  respecting  itself 
because  of  its  faith  in  a  sacred  mission  entrusted  to  it, 
and  beneath  which  it  may  not  fall  Avithout  dishonour, 
lifts  and  kindles  other  individualities,  and  exalts  their 
views  of  human  life.  It  does  this  work  with  tenfold 
greater  force  when  it  is  in  a  poet,  that  is,  in  one  who 
adds  to  its  moral  force  the  all-subduing  power  of  beauty. 
This  conviction,  which  cannot  belong  to  a  weak  poet, 
but  does  (when  it  is  consistent  throughout  life)  belong 
to  poets  whose  nature  is  hewn  out  of  the  living  rock,  en- 
ters as  stateliness  into  all  their  verse,  gives  it  a  moral 
virtue,  a  spiritual  strength,  and  emerges  in  a  certain 
grandeur  or  splendour  of  style,  more  or  less  fine  as  the 
character  is  more  or  less  nobly  mixed.  This  sense  of 
the  relation  the  poet  bears  to  mankind,  this  sense  he  has 
of  his  office  and  of  the  duty  it  imposes  on  him,  was  pro- 
foundly felt  by  Tennyson,  became  a  part  of  him  as  an 
artist,  and  was  an  element  in  every  line  he  wrote.  Per- 
sonal it  was,  but  it  was  personal  for  the  sake  of  human- 
ity ;  and  dignity,  stateliness  in  subjects,  in  thoughts  and 
in  style,  issued  naturally  from  that  conviction. 


8  Tennyson 

These  are  things  which  belong  to  a  poet's  art,  but  by 
themselves  they  would  not,  of  course,  make  him  an 
artist.  The  essential  difference  of  an  artist  is  love  of 
beauty  and  the  power  of  shaping  it.  The  greatness  of 
an  artist  is  proportionate  to  the  depth  and  truth  of  his 
love  of  beauty  ;  to  his  faithfulness  to  it,  and  to  his  un- 
remitting effort  to  train  his  natural  gift  of  shaping  it  into 
fuller  ease,  power,  and  permanence.  As  to  beauty  itself, 
men  talk  of  natural  beauty,  of  physical,  moral,  and  spirit- 
ual beauty,  and  these  term-divisions  have  their  use  ;  but 
at  root  all  beauty  is  one,  and  these  divided  forms  of  it 
are  modes  only  of  one  energy,  conditioned  by  the  ele- 
ments through  which  it  passes.  They  can  all  pass  into 
one  another,  and  they  can  all  be  expressed  in  terms  of 
one  another. 

To  define,  then,  what  beauty  is  in  itself  is  beyond  our 
power,  but  we  can  approach  a  definition  of  it  by  mark- 
ing out  clearly  its  results  on  us.  What  is  always  true  of 
beauty  is  this,  that,  wherever  it  appears,  it  awakens  love 
of  it  which  has  no  return  on  self,  but  which  bears  us  out 
of  ourselves  ;  it  stirs  either  joy  or  reverence  in  the  heart 
without  bringing  with  it  any  self-admiration  or  vanity  ; 
and  it  kindles  the  desire  of  reproducing  it,  not  that  we 
may  exult  in  our  own  skill  in  forming  it,  but  that  our 
reproduction  of  it  may  awaken  emotions  in  others  simi- 
lar to  those  which  the  original  sight  of  beauty  stirred  in 
our  own  heart — that  is,  it  more  or  less  forces  the  seer  of  it 
into  creation.  This  creation,  this  representation  of  the 
beautiful,  is  art  ;  and  the  most  skilful  representation  of 


Introduction  q 

the  ugly — that  is,  of  anything  which  awakens  either  re- 
pulsion, or  base  pleasure,  or  horror  which  does  not  set 
free  and  purify  the  soul,  or  scorn  instead  of  reverence, 
or  which  does  not  kindle  in  us  the  desire  of  reproduc- 
tion of  it  that  we  may  stir  in  others  similar  emotions  to 
our  own — is  not  art  at  all.  It  is  clever  imitation,  it  is 
skill,  it  is  artifice,  it  is  not  art.  It  is  characteristic  of  an 
age  which  is  writhing  under  the  frivolous  despotism  of 
positive  science  that  the  accurate  and  skilful  representa- 
tion of  things  and  facts  which  are  not  beautiful  is  called 
art  ;  and  it  belongs  to  all  persons  who  care  for  the 
growth  of  humanity,  not  to  denounce  this  error,  for  de- 
nunciation is  barren  of  results,  but  to  live  and  labour  for 
the  opposite  truth.  Far  more  rests  on  that  effort  than 
men  imagine.  A  third  at  least  of  the  future  betterment 
of  mankind,  to  which  we  now  look  forward  with  more 
hope  than  we  have  done  for  years,  depends  on  this  ef- 
fort, on  all  that  it  involves,  on  all  that  it  will  create  in 
the  imaginative  and  spiritual  life  of  the  human  race. 

With  a  few  exceptions,  into  which  this  tendency  to 
scientific  representation  carried  him — poems  of  dissec- 
tion and  denunciation,  like  Despair,  and  worse  still,  The 
Promise  of  May,  Tennyson  was  faithful  through  his 
whole  life  to  beauty,  writing  always  of  what  was  worthy 
of  love,  of  joy,  of  solemn  or  happy  reverence  ;  and  by 
this,  and  in  this  sphere,  was  the  steady  artist.  The  man- 
ifestation of  these  things,  his  creation  of  them,  for  the 
love  and  pleasure  and  veneration  of  himself  and  m**n, 
was  his  unbroken  delight. 


lO  Tennyson 

How  much  we  owe  to  him  for  this,  especially  at  this 
time,  only  the  future  will  fully  know.  It  is  true,  this 
faithfulness  to  beauty  is  the  foremost  characteristic  of 
all  great  artists,  the  very  quintessence  of  their  genius, 
that  which  makes  them  permanent  ;  but  he  deserves 
perhaps  more  praise  for  it  than  many  others,  for  he  was 
tempted  by  the  tendency  of  his  time  to  swerve  from  it, 
as  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  and  Keats  were  not  tempted. 
Once  or  twice  he  yielded,  as  I  said,  but  these  instances 
only  show  how  much  he  resisted,  and  how  faithfully. 
This,  then,  it  was  which  kept  him  always  fresh,  even  to 
advanced  age.  He  whose  eyes  are  steadily  fixed  on  the 
beautiful,  always  loves,  and  is  always  young. 

Moreover,  the  true  artist  has  written  on  his  heart, 
"  Love  not  the  world,  nor  the  things  of  the  world,"  and 
this,  in  spite  of  many  foolish  things  said  of  him,  was  true 
of  Tennyson.  If  what  I  said  of  his  love  of  beauty  be 
true,  he  could  not  have  bent  his  art  to  the  world,  and  he 
never  did.  For  the  artist  knows  that  absolute  beauty  is 
a  perfection  which  he  never  can  fully  grasp,  which  al- 
ways becomes  before  him  a  greater  ocean,  which  there- 
fore invites  and  kindles  an  incessant  pursuit.  He  can 
never  furl  his  sail  in  this  pursuit  ;  he  can  never  turn 
aside,  while  he  is  full  of  its  ardour,  to  any  lower  or 
meaner  love,  to  any  selfish  strife.  The  passion  it  makes 
glow  is  one  which  devours  all  other  passions.  The  de- 
sire to  reveal  beauty,  to  make  it  clear,  so  far  as  he  has 
seen  it,  is  a  desire  which  makes  all  merely  personal  de- 
sires common  and  unclean. 


Introduction  1 1 


Whatever  vulgar  folk  have  said  of  Tennyson,  his 
whole  work  breathes  with  that  desire,  I  do  not  believe, 
and  I  cannot  trace  in  one  line  of  his  poetry,  that  he  ever 
wrote  for  the  sake  of  money,  or  place,  or  to  catch  the 
popular  ear,  or  to  win  a  transient  praise.  He  wrote  only 
that  of  which  he  loved  to  write,  that  which  moved  him 
to  joy  or  reverence,  that  which  he  thought  of  good 
report  for  its  loveliness.  Even  the  things  he  did  as  Poet 
Laureate,  where,  if  ever,  he  might  have  been  untrue  to 
this,  have  no  tinge  of  the  world  about  them.  They 
speak  to  royalties  of  the  things  of  eternal  beauty,  of  the 
natural  sorrows  and  joys  of  faithful  motherhood  and 
wifehood,  of  duties  and  sacrifice  performed  in  high 
places — the  same  duties  and  sacrifice  which  might  be 
done  by  the  labourer  and  the  slave — of  love  and  honour 
and  faith,  of  those  ideals  of  humanity  which  are  as  capa- 
ble of  being  pursued  and  fulfilled  in  the  cottage  as  in  the 
palace.  The  Laureate  Odes  are  more  lessons  to  royal 
folk  than  celebrations  of  them. 

He  was,  then,  faithful  to  loveliness.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  he  saw  all  the  universe  of  man  and 
Nature  and  of  God  in  their  relation  to  ineffable  beauty, 
and  that  the  getting  of  this  pervading  essence  out  of  all 
things,  the  shaping  of  it,  and  the  crying  of — **  Look 
there  ;  love  and  worship,  rejoice  and  reverence,"  was  the 
one  supreme  thing  in  his  art  for  which  he  cared.  This 
may  be  said  of  all  true  poets,  and  it  is  here  said  of  him. 
It  is  the  mightiest  debt  we  owe  to  the  faithful  artists, 
and  we  feel  it  all  the   more  deeply  at   a  time  when  art 


12  Tennyson 

yields  more  than  is  seemly  to  the  temptations  of  the 
world. 

But  the  power  of  seeing  beauty,  and  the  love  ot 
beauty,  are  not  all  that  makes  the  great  artist.  He  must 
also  have  the  power  of  shaping  the  beauty  which  he  sees, 
and  in  a  way  peculiarly  his  own.  There  must  be  in  the 
work  the  personal  touch,  the  individual  surprise,  the 
unique  way,  the  unimitated  shaping  which  provokes 
imitation.  We  ought  to  feel  in  every  artist's  work  the 
immediate  pressure  of  an  original,  personal  creator,  who 
has  his  own  special  manner  with  things  and  words.  This 
is  one  of  the  main  tests  of  genius.  Of  every  great  poet 
it  is  true,  and  it  is  plainly  true  of  Tennyson.  Every 
line  is  alive  with  his  own  distinction. 

On  his  natural  gift  of  creating,  and  on  his  careful 
training  of  it,  I  need  not  dwell,  nor  yet  on  his  practice 
and  love  of  the  skilfulnesses  of  his  art,  of  the  careful 
study  of  words  and  their  powers  in  verse,  of  his  mingled 
strength  and  daintiness  and  weakness,  of  all  that  belongs 
to  Form.  These  things  and  their  like  in  him  have  been 
for  years  the  food  of  critics.  No  one  disputes  that  he 
touched  excellence  in  them,  or  that  he  had  the  power 
of  creation.  But  I  maintain  that  all  his  technique  was 
not  for  his  own  sake,  but  was  first  urged  by  his  love  of 
beauty.  It  was  necessary,  for  the  sake  of  his  faithful- 
ness to  her,  that  the  shape  he  gave  to  what  he  loved 
should  be  as  perfect,  as  strong,  as  gracious,  and  as  full 
of  delightful  surprises  as  he  could  make  it  ;  and  not  one 
of  our  poets  has  striven  with  a  more  unfailing  intensity 


Introduction 


13 


to  do  this  honour  to  all  the  beauty  he  saw  in  Nature  and 
in  man  ;  as  eager  in  this  at  eighty  as  at  thirty  years.  It 
is  a  great  lesson  to  all  artists  ;  it  is  a  lesson  to  us  all. 

Power,  then,  to  see  beauty,  power  to  shape  it,  these 
were  his.  How  far  he  saw  it,  with  what  degrees  of  ex- 
cellence he  shaped  it,  how  great  an  artist  he  was — is  not 
now  the  question.  The  question  is,  Did  he  always  see 
it  with  love  and  joy  ;  did  he  always  shape  it  with  faithful 
ness  ?  And  I  answer  that  his  fidelity  to  beauty,  when- 
ever he  saw  it,  was  unbroken. 

II 

Tennyson's  Relation  to  Christianity. — The  next 
subject  I  treat  of  in  this  Introduction  is  Tennyson's  rela- 
tion to  Christianity. 

When  Tennyson  passed  from  school  to  the  univer- 
sity, religious  life  in  England  had  very  much  decayed. 
The  spirit  which  animated  Wesley,  and  which  had 
fallen  like  the  prophet's  mantle  on  the  earlier  Evan- 
gelicals, had  now  become  cold.  English  religion,  in 
and  out  of  the  Church,  was  like  the  valley  Ezekiel 
described,  full  of  bones,  and  the  bones  were  dry.  And 
in  the  midst  of  the  valley  one  figure,  now  old,  who  had 
seen  the  fire  of  religious  sacrifice  rise  high  to  God  in  the 
past,  who  had  welcomed  its  descent  and  directed  it  into 
new  channels  but  who  had  outlived  his  enthusiasms,  went 
to  and  fro,  chilled  at  heart,  and  wailing  for  what  had 
been.  It  was  the  soul  of  Coleridge,  and  if  the  voice  of 
the  Spirit  asked  him  :     "  Son  of  Man,  can  these  bones 


14  Tennyson 

live  ? "  he  answered,  but  not  in  hope,  "  0  Lord  God, 
Thou  knowest."  He  died  before  he  saw  the  resurrec- 
tion which  Tennyson  saw,  the  blowing  of  the  wind  of 
God,  and  the  bones  coming  together,  and  the  slain 
breathed  upon,  so  that  they  lived  and  stood  upon  their 
feet,  an  exceeding  great  army.  Nevertheless,  the  old 
prophet  did  his  work,  and  his  power  moved  in  the  two 
men,  though  in  a  very  different  fashion,  who,  in  the 
same  years  Avhich  saw  a  political  and  poetic  resurrection, 
awakened  into  a  new  spring,  with  all  the  promise  of 
summer,  the  religious  life  of  England.  The  true  begin- 
ning of  Tennyson's  as  of  Browning's  poetical  life  w^as 
coincident  with  the  birth  of  the  movements  afterwards 
called  the  High  Church  and  the  Broad  Church  move- 
ments, and  with  the  birth  of  a  new  political  and  social  era. 

Never  alone 

Come  the  immortals. 

This  religious  awakening  was  felt  and  seized  by  two 
distinct  types  of  character,  or  of  human  tendency,  and 
crystallised  by  two  representative  men,  by  J.  H.  New- 
man and  Frederick  Maurice  ;  and  it  is  curious  for  those 
who  care  for  analogies  to  the  evolution  of  species  to 
trace  how  the  one  w-as  the  child  of  the  University  of 
Oxford  and  the  other  of  the  University  of  Cambridge. 
The  main  difference  \vhich  lay  between  their  method  of 
presenting  the  faith  was  a  time-difference,  if  I  may  be 
allowed  to  invent  that  term.  In  the  matter  of  religion 
the  past  was  the  foremost  thing  to  Newman,  to  Maurice 


Introduction  15 


the  present.  Newman  looked  back  to  the  past  (the 
nearer  to  the  Apostles  the  nearer  to  truth)  for  the  high- 
est point  to  which  religious  life,  but  not  doctrine,  had 
attained,  and  his  immense  reverence  for  the  past  became 
part  of  the  mind  of  Tennyson.  But  it  was  balanced  in 
Tennyson  by  even  a  greater  reverence  for  the  present 
as  containing  in  it  an  immediate  inspiration  and  revela- 
tion from  God.  This  foundation  for  poetic  thought  and 
emotion  was  given  to  him  by  the  religious  work  of 
Maurice.  The  deepest  thought  in  the  mind  of  Maurice 
was  that  God  was  moving  in  the  present  as  fully  as  He 
had  moved  in  the  past  ;  and  the  incessant  representa- 
tion of  this,  in  every  form  of  it,  was  his  great  contribu- 
tion to  Theology.  Of  course,  others  before  him  had 
said  similar  things,  but  he  said  this  in  a  new  way,  and 
under  new  conditions.  Maurice  could  not,  however, 
quite  escape  from  the  web  of  the  past,  and  his  struggle 
to  combine  the  past  and  the  present  entangled  him,  en- 
tangled his  mind,  and  entangled  his  followers.  When 
he  clung,  as  he  did,  to  the  ancient  intellectual  formulas 
as  laid  down  in  the  Creeds  and  Services  of  the  Church, 
and  tried  to  weave  them  into  harmony  with  his  main 
faith,  he  damaged  his  position,  and,  up  to  a  certain  point, 
his  work. 

Tennyson,  as  a  poet,  did  not  fall  into  this  ill-fortuned 
position.  What  his  personal  views  were  concerning  the 
creed  of  Christendom  is  not  the  question  here.  It 
would  be  an  impertinence  to  discuss  them.  That  is  a 
private  matter,  and  we  shall  hear  what  his  family  chose 


i6  Tennyson 

to  disclose  to  us  at  the  fitting  time.  But  his  poetry  is  a 
public  possession,  and  in  that  poetry  there  is  naturally 
no  doctrinal  confession,  no  intellectual  propositions 
Avhich  define  his  faith.  I  say  naturally,  because  art  has 
to  do  with  the  illimitable,  with  that  which  is  for  ever  in- 
capable of  definition,  with  the  things  that  belong  to  love 
and  beauty,  joy  and  hope  and  veneration — the  shapes, 
degrees,  powers,  and  glory  of  which  are  for  ever  build- 
ing, un-building,  and  rebuilding  themselves  in  each 
man's  soul  and  in  the  soul  of  the  whole  world.  Art  not 
only  rejects,  it  abhors  all  attempts  to  bind  down  into  un- 
changing forms  the  thoughts  and  emotions  which  play 
like  lightning  round  the  infinite  horizons  towards  which 
the  imagination  sails,  piloted  by  love,  and  hope,  and 
faith.  It  has  no  creeds,  no  articles  of  faith,  no  schemes 
of  salvation,  no  confessions  ;  it  cannot  have  them  by  its 
very  nature.  The  unknowable,  but  the  believable,  is  its 
country,  its  native  land,  its  home. 

Whatever,  then,  in  this  matter  of  religion,  the  man  as 
thinker  may  confess,  the  man  as  poet  keeps  in  the  realm 
of  the  undefined,  beyond  analysis,  beyond  reasoning. 
When  he  does  not,  when  he  is  tempted  into  analytic  dis- 
cussion, into  doctrinal  definition,  he  ceases  to  be  a  poet 
for  the  time  and  the  trouble  into  which  he  gets  is  pitia- 
ble. When  Milton  argues  like  a  school  divine,  when 
Wordsworth  draws  out  a  plan  of  education,  when  Byron 
explains  his  view  of  original  sin,  how  sad  it  is,  how  the 
Muses  cover  their  faces,  how  angrily  Apollo  frowns ! 
Even  Dante,  who  was  obliged  to  do  something  of  this 


Introduction  17 


kind  of  work,  does  it  only  as  a  means  by  which  he  may 
launch  himself  forward  into  the  infinite.  And  Tenny- 
son rarely  in  this  way  lost  his  position  as  an  artist. 
There  is  no  formulated  creed  in  his  work. 

But  the  main  faiths  of  Maurice,  which  were  assertions 
of  what  he  conceived  to  be  "  eternal  verities  "  concerning 
the  relations  of  God  to  man  and  to  the  universe,  and 
concerning  the  end  to  which  God  was  leading  them — 
assertions  backed  up  by  no  proof,  for  the  matters  in- 
sisted on  could  neither  be  proved  nor  disproved — were 
naturally  in  the  realm  of  the  imagination,  of  faith  and 
hope,  in  the  infinite  realm  of  love,  and  were  brought  to 
receive  acceptance  or  dismissal  before  the  tribunal  of 
human  emotion,  not  before  the  tribunal  of  the  under- 
standing. As  such  they  were  proper  subjects  of  poetry; 
and  the  ever-working  immanence  of  God  in  man  and  in 
the  universe  as  Will  and  Love,  as  King  and  Father  ;  the 
necessary  brotherhood  of  man,  and  the  necessary  prac- 
tice of  love  one  to  another,  if  all  were  in  God  ;  the  nec- 
essary evolution  (if  this  vital  union  between  God  and 
man  existed)  of  the  human  race  into  perfect  love  and 
righteousness,  and  the  necessary  continuance  on  the 
same  hypothesis  of  each  man's  personal  consciousness 
in  a  life  to  be  ;  the  necessary  vitality  of  the  present — 
that  deep  need  for  high  poetic  work — man  alive  and  Na- 
ture alive,  and  alive  with  the  life  of  God — these  faiths 
(I  will  not  call  them  doctrines,  for  their  definition 
changes  incessantly  with  the  progress  of  human  thought 

and  feeling)  lay  at  the  root  of  the  religion  we  find  in  the 
2 


1 8  Tennyson 

poetry  of  Tennyson  and  influenced  that  poetry  from  1830 
to  1892.  They  were  part  of  the  elements  of  the  soil 
out  of  which  his  poetry  grew,  and  by  them,  and  by  the 
way  in  which  he  held  them,  carefully  keeping  them  apart 
from  all  intellectual  definition  and  in  the  realm  of  faith 
alone,  he  is  separated  on  the  one  side  from  all  those 
poets  who  either  ignore  these  things  like  Keats  or  pro- 
fess disbelief  in  them  like  Shelley,  and  on  the  other  side 
from  all  those  poets  who  like  Milton,  Byron,  or  Browning 
have  a  definite  theology  in  their  poetry. 

These  things,  then,  may  justly  be  said  with  regard  to 
the  religious  elements  in  the  poetry  of  Tennyson,  and 
they  are  all  contained  in  In  Memoriam  ;  nay  more,  they 
are  the  very  basis  of  that  poem.  But  the  assertion  of 
them  does  not  answer  the  question  :  What  relation  does 
Tennyson's  poetry  bear  to  Christianity  ?  For  all  these 
beliefs  might  be  held  by  a  Theist — even  by  one  who 
ignored  or  depreciated  the  teaching  of  Jesus.  If 
Tennyson  is  then  to  be  claimed  as  a  Christian  poet  it 
must  be  shown  that  he  considered  Jesus  to  be  the  great 
proclaimer  of  these  truths,  the  one  who  concentrated 
into  Himself  the  religious  truths  which  before  Him  had 
been  in  man,  re-formed  them  in  His  own  thought,  and 
issued  them  with  new  power  and  charged  with  new  love, 
to  claim  the  belief  of  men.  This  certainly  was  Tenny- 
son's position.*  So  far  as  that  goes,  Tennyson  was 
distinctly  Christian,  and  this  is  the  position  of  a  great 

*  In  Memoriam,  xxxvi. 


Introduction  19 


number  of  persons  at  the  present  day.  But  if  that  be  all, 
then  a  great  number  of  persons  will  deny  him  the  right 
to  call  himself  a  Christian.  In  their  mind  a  Christian 
man  must  have  a  distinct  faith  in  Jesus  as  God,  as  the 
unique  Saviour  of  man,  and  as  a  revealer  of  God  in  a 
way  different  in  kind  from  that  in  which  we  can  call 
any  other  person  a  saviour  or  revealer.  Is  that  view 
contained  in  Tennyson's  poetry  ?  We  cannot  take  the 
phrases  concerning  Christ  used  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King, 
or  such  phrases  as  "  Him  who  died  for  me  "  in  The  May 
Queen,  as  any  proof  of  his  views,  for  these  might  be 
said  to  be  only  local  colour  ;  but  when  we  come  to  In 
Memortam  we  have  before  us  a  poem  exceedingly  per- 
sonal and  distinctly  theological  ;  and  Christ  is  called 
there  "  The  Life  indeed  "  ;  His  power  to  raise  the  dead 
is  confessed  ;  He  is  the  receiver  of  the  souls  of  the  dead 
into  the  world  beyond  this  world  ;  He  is  the  Word  of 
God  that  breathed  human  breath  and  wrought  out  the 
faith  with  human  deeds.  This  is  not  enough  to  make 
Tennyson,  as  a  poet,  an  orthodox  Christian  in  the  doc- 
trinal sense,  but  it  is  enough  to  place  him  among 
those  who  confess  Jesus  as  the  Light  of  the  world,  as 
their  spiritual  Master,  their  Life  ;  and  that  with  a  dis- 
tinctness which  does  not  belong  to  any  other  of  the  great 
poets  of  this  century,  so  far  as  their  poetry  is  concerned. 
This  position  becomes  a  certainty  if  the  introduction  to 
In  Memortam — beginning  "  Strong  Son  of  God,  immortal 
Love  " — be  an  address  to  Jesus.  I  think  it  is,  and  that 
this  is  the  most  natural  explanation  ;  but  nevertheless  it 


20  Tennyson 

is  left  vague.  On  the  whole,  there  is  no  clear  doctrinal 
definition  of  the  person  or  the  work  of  Christ.  What  is 
not  left  vague,  what  is  quite  clear,  is  that  Tennyson  is 
more  Christian  than  Theist  ;  that  no  mere  Theist  could 
have  said  the  things  that  he  has  said  in  In  Memoriam. 

This  absence  of  definite  doctrine,  which  is  the  reason 
many  persons  say  that  Tennyson  was  not  a  Christian 
(holding  the  amusing  theory  that  the  Nicene  Creed 
rather  than  the  teaching  of  Jesus  is  the  test  of  Christian- 
ity) is,  first  of  all,  necessitated  by  his  art ;  secondly,  it 
is  in  itself  Christian.  Definite  doctrinal  statements  are, 
as  I  said,  abhorrent  to  poetry.  They  belong  to  the  world 
of  the  understanding,  to  the  world  of  analysis — a  world 
in  which  the  artist  cannot  breathe  at  ease,  and  in  which, 
if  he  continue,  his  art  decays  and  dies.  They  take  him 
out  of  the  illimitable  sky  in  which  the  imagination  flies 
towards  the  unknown,  the  yet  unconceived,  and  the 
ever-varying  unchangeable.  Had  Tennyson  defined  his 
view  of  Jesus,  he  would  never  have  said  "  Ring  in  the 
Christ  which  is  to  be."  In  that  line  the  idea  of  Christ 
and  his  Gospel  in  mankind  is  given  an  infinite  extension. 
We  may  give  the  phrase  fifty  meanings,  and  we  shall 
not  exhaust  it ;  and  a  hundred  years  hence  it  will  have 
totally  different  meanings  allotted  to  it  by  the  gentlemen 
who  wish  to  define. 

Secondly,  this  absence  of  propositions  invented  by 
the  intellect,  in  which  ideas  like  the  immanence  of  God 
in  man  are  limited  to  one  meaning,  in  which  the  Father- 
hood  of  God  or  the  brotherhood  of  man  is  rendered 


Introduction  21 


particular  instead  of  being  left  universal,  is  in  harmony 
with  the  teaching  of  Jesus.  He  proclaimed  truths 
which  He  believed  to  be  universal — God's  Fatherhood, 
man's  brotherhood,  love  as  the  absolute  life  of  God  and 
of  man,  personal  immortality  in  God,  the  forgiveness  of 
Ain — but  He  never  put  these  into  any  fixed  intellectual 
.Torm  ;  He  never  attempted  to  prove  them  by  argument  ; 
He  never  limited  them  by  a  prosiac  statement  of  their 
import ;  He  never  took  them  out  of  the  realm  of  love 
and  faith  ;  He  never  gave  them  a  special  shape  or 
organised  them  into  a  body  of  belief.  He  left  them  free, 
left  them  as  spirit  and  life  ;  and  as  to  their  form,  every 
nation  and  kindred  and  tongue,  every  kind  of  society, 
nay,  every  person,  could  give  them  whatever  intellectual 
shape  each  of  them  pleased.  If  they  were  loved  and 
felt,  and  the  love  at  the  root  of  them  expressed  in  the 
action  of  a  life,  I  do  not  believe  that  Jesus  cared  at  all 
what  form  they  took  in  the  understanding,  or  how  they 
were  organised  into  ritual  and  creed — provided  only  the 
form  or  the  organisation  did  not  contradict  the  univer- 
sality of  the  love  of  God,  or  the  universality  of  the  love 
between  man  and  man  which  was  contained  in  them. 
Theological  creeds  were  nothing  to  Jesus,  but  their 
limitations  which  produced  hatreds  and  cruelties  and 
quarrels,  these,  to  this  hour,  He  looks  upon  with  the  pity 
and  the  indignation  of  love.  The  absence  then  of 
definite  opinions  about  infinite  truths,  which  is  the  neces- 
sary position  of  the  poet,  which  was  the  position  of  Ten- 
nyson in  his  poetry,  is  the  position  of  Christ  Himself. 


22  Tennyson 

Again,  Christianity  does  not  take  the  same  ground  as 
ethics,  nor  was  Christ,  primarily,  a  moral  teacher.  "  This 
do  and  thou  shalt  live,"  the  moralist  says,  and  it  is  a 
good  thing  to  say.  "  When  you  have  done  all,"  says 
Jesus,  carrying  the  whole  matter  of  life  into  boundless 
aspiration,  "  say,  We  are  unprofitable  servants,  we  have 
done  only  what  it  was  our  duty  to  do,"  "  Lord,  how 
oft  shall  I  forgive  my  brother  ?  Unto  seven  times  ? 
Surely  there  must  be  some  definition."  "  Unto  seven 
times  ? "  answered  Christ,  in  astonishment  at  any  limit 
to  forgiveness — "  nay,  any  number  of  times — to  seventy 
times  seven  !  "  "  All  these  things,"  cried  the  young 
moralist,  "  all  these  duties,  I  have  kept  from  my  youth 
up.  What  lack  I  yet  ?  "  That  was  the  cry  of  the  ideal 
in  him  :  the  inward  longing  for  something  more  than 
conduct — for  the  unknown  perfection.  And  Jesus, 
answering  this  aspiration  to  the  ideal,  to  those  unreached 
summits  of  love  which  transcend  duty — said,  "  Sell  what 
thou  hast,  and  give  to  the  poor,  and  come  and  follow 
me."  "  Whom  shall  I  love,"  they  asked  ;  "  my  rela- 
tions, my  friends,  my  own  nation,  the  members  of  my 
Church  ?  Where  is  the  limit  ?  "  There  is  no  limit,  was 
the  teaching  of  Jesus  ;  the  infinitude  of  God's  love  is 
your  true  aim.  "  Love  your  enemies,  do  good  to  them 
that  hate  you  ;  so  you  will  be  like  your  Father  in  heaven, 
whose  sun  shines  on  the  evil  and  good  alike."  "  Shall 
I  be  content  with  the  duties  which  I  can  do,  with  the 
love  I  can  certainly  give  to  my  fellow-men,  with  the 
plain  things  which  lie  before  me  in  this  world,  with  the 


Introduction  23 


possible  in  conduct  ?  "  No,  thought  Jesus,  that  is  not 
my  teaching,  nor  the  ground  I  take.  You  must  aspire 
to  the  impossible,  strive  to  be  equal  to  the  infinite  Love, 
love  far  beyond  anything  you  can  understand.  It  is  not 
the  possible,  but  the  perfect,  for  which  you  must  live. 
"  Be  ye  perfect  in  love,  even  as  your  Father  is  perfect  in 
love."  Union  with  the  infinite  Love  by  loving  ;  that  is 
the  aim  of  man,  an  illimitable  aim. 

At  every  point  this  position  of  Christ  is  in  the  strictest 
analogy  to  that  which  the  artist  takes  up  with  regard  to 
beauty.  Love,  not  duty,  is  the  first  thing  with  Jesus  ; 
the  teaching  of  loving,  not  the  teaching  of  morality.  If 
love  be  secured,  morality  is  secured.  If  a  man  love 
God,  that  is,  if  he  love  the  living  source  of  love,  right- 
eousness, justice  and  truth,  he  is  absolutely  certain  to 
secure  noble  conduct.  Morality  then  is  not  neglected, 
it  is  taken  in  the  stride  of  love.  And  that  is  the  root 
of  Jesus.  Love  fulfils  the  law  ;  and  all  the  poets,  and 
every  artist  (whether  nominally  a  Christian  or  not)  take 
a  similar  position.  Love,  in  its  tireless  outgoings  to- 
wards infinite  beauty — the  seen  suggesting  for  ever  the 
unseen  beauty,  and  that  which  is  conceived  of  it  open- 
ing out  a  vision  of  new  loveliness  as  yet  unconceived — is 
the  artists'  root  ;  and  whatever  morality  they  teach  is 
the  secondary  matter,  comes  as  a  necessary  result  of 
love  having  its  perfect  work — love  which,  when  we  have 
reached  the  farthest  horizon  we  first  saw  of  it,  opens  out 
another  equally  far,  and  when  we  have  attained  that, 
another,  and  again  another,  always  and  for  ever. 


24  Tennyson 

This  is  the  Christian  position,  and  it  is  the  position 
Tennyson  preserves  all  through  his  poetry.  There  is  no 
one,  it  is  true,  from  whose  work  better  lessons  can  be 
drawn  for  the  conduct  of  life,  for  morals  in  their  higher 
ranges,  than  can  be  drawn  from  Tennyson.  But  below 
all  conduct,  as  its  foundation  impulse,  lies  in  this  poet's 
work  the  love  of  the  infinite  Love,  the  passion  of  unend- 
ing effort  for  it,  and  the  conviction  of  an  eternity  of  life 
in  which  to  pursue  after  it.  This  eternal  continuance  in 
us  of  the  conscious  life  of  love  ;  in  other  words,  of  in- 
cessant action  towards  greater  nearness  to  the  illimitable 
Love  which  is  God,  is  the  position  of  Christ  ;  and  it  is 
the  position  of  one  who  believes  in  a  personal  immor- 
tality. One  of  the  foundation  faiths  of  Jesus  was  that 
every  man  and  woman  was  as  unbrokenly  connected 
with  the  Eternal  God  as  a  child  is  with  a  father.  God 
was  our  nearest  relation  ;  the  relationship  was  a  personal 
one,  and  could  never  be  untied.  In  that,  our  immortal 
continuance,  our  immortal  personality,  our  immortal 
goodness,  were  necessarily  contained.  The  declaration 
of  immortality  was  not  in  itself  new,  but  this  ground  of 
it — the  Fatherhood  of  God  and  the  childhood  to  Him  of 
every  man  so  that  each  soul  was  felt  by  God,  in  Him- 
self, as  a  special  person  to  whom  He  was  in  a  special 
relation — this,  and  the  universality  of  its  application, 
were  new. 

This  was  Tennyson's  position.  It  might  be  proved 
up  to  the  hilt  from  his  poetry,  and  it  makes  him  clearly 
Christian.     Owing  to  the  circumstances  of  his  time,  it 


Introduction 


25 


was  especially  round  this  question  of  immortality  that 
Tennyson,  in  his  relation  to  Christianity,  concentrated 
himself.  Its  truth  held  in  it  for  him  the  Fatherhood  of 
God,  the  salvation  of  man,  the  brotherhood  of  man, 
the  worth  of  human  life.  If  it  were  not  true,  Christianity 
in  his  eyes  was  not  true,  there  was  no  God  in  the  universe 
for  man  ;  there  was  no  true  union  possible  between  man 
and  man  ;  there  was  no  religion — nothing  to  bind  men 
together  ;  there  was  no  explanation  of  the  pain  of  earth, 
and  the  whole  history  of  man  was  a  dreadful  tragedy. 
That  was  his  view,  and  he  maintained  it  with  all  a  poet's 
fervor. 

But  it  would  not  be  true  to  say  that  Tennyson  had 
not  to  fight  for  it  against  thoughts  within  which  endeav- 
oured to  betray  it,  and  against  doubts  which  besieged  it 
from  without.  He  did  not  always  repose  in  it  ;  he  had 
to  fight  for  it  sword  in  hand,  and  many  a  troublous 
wound  he  took.  He  was  a  poet,  sensitive  to  all  the 
movements  of  the  world  around  him,  and  it  fell  to  his 
lot  to  live  at  a  time  when  the  faith  in  immortality  has  had 
to  run  the  gauntlet  between  foes  or  seeming  friends,  of 
a  greater  variety  and  of  a  greater  skill  than  ever  before 
in  the  history  of  man.  He  felt  every  form  of  this  attack 
in  himself ;  he  battled  with  himself  as  he  felt  them  ;  he 
battled  with  them  outside  himself  ;  and  he  won  his  per- 
sonal victory,  having  sympathised  thus,  throughout  the 
course  of  sixty  years,  with  those  who  have  had  to  fight 
the  same  battle.  Of  what  worth  his  contribution  is  to 
the  problem  is  not  the  question  here.     I   only  state  the 


26  Tennyson 

fact,  and  the  manner  in  which  it  was  done.  It  was  done 
in  the  manner  of  a  poet — never  by  argument  as  such, 
rarely  from  the  intellectual  point  of  view — but  by  an 
appeal  to  the  emotions,  by  an  appeal  to  the  necessities 
of  love.  Had  he  done  otherwise,  he  would  have,  at  that 
l)oint,  ceased  to  be  the  poet,  ceased  to  rest  the  truth  of 
immortality  on  faith  in  that  unprovable  conviction  that 
there  w^as  a  God  and  that  He  was  indissolubly  bound  up 
with  the  personality  of  all  of  His  children. 

The  trouble  began  early  with  him.  The  religious 
change  I  have  noted  in  the  thirtys  disturbed,  no  doubt, 
his  early  faith,  and  the  result  is  written  for  us  in  the 
Confessions  of  a  Sensitive  Mind.  Vacillation  of  faith  is 
the  basis  of  that  poem  ;  and  no  answer  is  given  to  the 
questions  proposed  therein.  Again,  the  whole  question 
— on  the  basis  of  "  Is  life  worth  living?  Is  it  not  better 
not  to  be  ? " — is  taken  up  in  The  Tivo  Voices.  The 
answer  is — "  Life  is  not  Avorth  living  if  it  does  not  con- 
tinue, if  love  is  not  immortal  in  God  and  in  us."  Then 
The  Vision  of  Sin  asks  the  same  question  in  another  form. 
Sensual  pleasure  in  youth  has  ended  in  cynicism  in  age. 
What  hope  ?  There  is  an  answer,  the  poet  says,  but  it  is 
in  a  tongue  no  man  can  understand  ;  nevertheless  it 
comes  out  of  a  horizon  where  God  showb  like  a  rose  of 
dawn. 

The  same  question  forms  the  basis  of  In  Memoriam. 
What  is  the  proper  answer  to  the  problem  of  sorrow^  of 
the  loss  of  those  we  love — to  the  cry  of  the  breaking 
heart   all  over  the  world  ?     Immortal  life  in  God  who  is 


Introduction  27 


immortal  Love,  and  therefore  immortal  Life,  is  the 
answer  ;  immortal  development — immortal  union  with 
all  we  love  ;  the  never-ending  evolution  of  all  into  more 
and  more  of  pjerfection. 

One  God — one  law — one  element, 

And  one  far-off  divine  event, 

To  which  the  whole  creation  moves. 

A  number  of  questions  arising  out  of  the  matter  are 
proposed,  many  speculations  are  made,  but  the  answers 
suggested  are  all  founded,  in  the  necessary  manner  of 
a  poet,  on  an  appeal  to  love  in  us,  and  to  the  love  which, 
if  there  be  a  supreme  goodness,  must  be  at  the  very  root 
of  His  being. 

Lastly,  it  is  plain  that  Tennyson  had,  when  he  finished 
In  Memonam,  settled  down  into  quiet  on  this  matter. 
He  had  fought  his  doubts  and  laid  them.  But  the  time 
in  which  he  lived  did  not  let  him  rest.  He  had  again  to 
put  on  his  armour  and  to  draw  his  sword.  The  argu- 
ment of  Darwin  that  our  conscience  and  our  emotions 
came  by  descent  from  the  brutes  was  used  as  an  argu- 
ment against  immortality.  The  great  development  of 
physiological  science  tended  to  increase  among  persons 
of  a  certain  set  of  mind  a  naked  materialism,  more  or  less 
cynical ;  and  especially  went  against  all  beliefs,  like  that 
of  immortality,  which  could  not  be  tested  by  experiment. 
Then,  all  the  outward  authority  on  which  the  Christian 
faith  had  long  reposed,  the  grey-haired,  authority  of  the 
Church,  the  younger  authority  of  the  infallibility  of  the 
Bible,  was  shaken  to  its  foundations  by  the   application 


28  Tennyson 

of  the  science  of  historical  criticism  to  the  New  Tes- 
tament stories  and  to  the  history  of  the  Early  Church, 
so  that  the  outward  authority  for  immortality  passed 
away  from  the  minds  of  multitudes,  and  with  it  that 
which  is  bound  up  with  it — the  belief  in  a  Divine  Father 
of  mankind. 

And,  now,  among  those — the  greater  number,  it  is 
true — who  still  clung  to  these  faiths,  there  was  no  longer 
peace.  Doubts,  incessant  questions  troubled  them  ; 
faith  veiled  her  face  for  long  periods.  Men  and  women 
fought  and  still  fight  for  the  truths  dearest  to  them,  as 
Arthur  fought  with  his  foes  in  that  dim,  weird  battle  of 
the  West,  in  a  chill  and  blinding  vapour,  and  looking  up 
to  heaven  only  see  the  mist. 

Then  it  was  that  Tennyson — and  it  is  from  his  poetry 
alone  that  I  gather  this — shaken  out  of  his  certainty  in 
/«  Memoriam,  feeling  all  the  new  trouble  of  the  w'orld, 
took  up  again  the  sword  against  his  own  questionings 
and  against  the  scepticism  of  the  world  in  which  he 
lived.  The  mystery  of  the  pains  of  life,  side  by  side 
with  a  God  of  love,  deepened  around  him.  No  creed, 
no  faith,  seemed  to  completely  answer  it.  But  all  the 
more,  he  felt  that  the  only  chance  of  an  answer  was  in 
clinging  to  the  conviction  of  a  life  to  come  in  which  all 
shall  be  wrought  into  union  with  God.  Once  or  twice 
he  was  carried  beyond  tolerance  into  hot  indignation 
with  those  who  took  away  what  he  believed  to  be  the 
only  reply  to  the  problem  of  pain  and  evil. 

In  his  poem    of   Despair  he  denounced  the    "  know- 


Introduction  29 


nothings,"  as  he  called  them,  as  well  as  the  liars  who  held 
eternal  punishment,  and  with  equal  wrath  and  vigour. 
In  The  Promise  of  May  he  painted,  and  unfairly,  the 
materialist  as  almost  necessarily  immoral.  He  need  not 
have  been  so  angry,  and  he  did  no  good  by  the  passages 
of  attack  in  those  poems.  Had  he  believed  more  at  the 
time  he  wrote  them  he  would  not  have  been  so  violent. 
He  would  have  felt  that,  if  all  men  were  God's  children, 
it  mattered  little  whether  these  persons  denied  immor- 
tality or  not.  They  would  find  out  the  truth  in  the  end, 
and  their  disbelief  could  do  no  final  harm  to  them  or  to 
mankind.  However,  as  his  life  went  on,  his  anger 
seemed  to  pass  away.  He  resumed  his  old  method  of 
warfare — the  method  of  the  artist — the  appeal  to  love, 
the  appeal  to  the  heart  of  man,  the  appeal  to  the  incred- 
ibility of  all  the  glory  and  all  the  growth  of  man,  of  all 
the  dreadfulness  of  his  fate,  being  alike  closed  in  univer- 
sal death.  Many  are  the  poems  in  his  later  volumes, 
poems  like  Fastness,  for  example,  which  take  up  this 
artist-position.  At  last,  as  it  seems,  all  his  distress  ceased 
in  quiet,  in  a  faith  even  more  settled  than  that  of  In 
Memoriam.  Some  trouble  still  lives  in  the  last  volume, 
published  while  he  was  yet  alive.  Vastness  still  strikes 
a  wavering  note.  He  says  in  another  poem  that,  "  In 
spite  of  every  creed  and  faith,  Life  is  the  Mystery."  In 
the  poem,  By  an  Evolutionist,  the  end  seems  a  matter  of 
hope  rather  than  of  certainty.  The  last  poem  in  the 
book,  Crossing  the  Bar,  is  the  first  clear  cry  of  happy 
faith — all   doubt  and  trouble  past  ;    and  it  is  a  quiet 


30  Tennyson 

faith  that  persists  through  the  new  volume  which  con- 
tains his  last  words  to  the  people  of  England.  The 
Making  of  Mari,  while  it  accepts  evolution,  carries  it 
onward  to  the  perfect  accomplishment  of  all  humanity 
in  God  : 

Hallelujah  to  the  Maker.     It  is  finished.     Man  is  made. 

The  Dreamer  has  no  uncertainty.  Doiibi  and  Prayer 
and  Faith,  the  one  following  the  other,  assert  that  *'  Love 
is  his  Father,  Brother,  and  his  God,"  and  that  Death 
flings  open  the  gates  of  all  that  we  desire  in  the  heart. 
God  and  the  Universe,  written  on  the  threshold  of  death, 
reveals  that  all  the  fear  of  dissolution  has  gone  for  ever, 
"  The  face  of  Death  is  toward  the  Sun  of  Life — his 
truer  name  is  '  Onward,'  "  so  the  poet  speaks  again  to 
the  mourners  in  the  last  poem  of  his  last  book. 

This  faithful  fighter  thea,  who  stood,  like  Horatius, 
for  sixty  years  defending  the  strait  bridge  of  faith  in 
immortal  life,  defending  it  against  his  own  doubts  and 
those  of  his  time,  laid  down  his  arms  at  last,  conscious 
of  his  victory.  Time  will  tell  whether  it  is  a  victory  also 
for  us.  For  my  part,  I  have  no  shadow  of  doubt  as  to 
the  conclusion  the  world  will  finally  come  to  on  this 
matter ;  and  when  that  conclusion  is  reached,  the  long 
battle  of  Tennyson  for  the  Christian  faith,  for  God  as 
the  Father  of  all,  and  for  the  necessary  inference  of 
immortality  from  that  primary  declaration  of  Christ 
Jesus,  will  be  acknowledged  by  the  steady  gratitude  of 
mankind. 


Introduction  31 


III 
Tennyson's  Relation  to  Social  Politics. — I  now 

turn,  in  this  Introduction,  to  Tennyson's  relation  to  the 
movement  of  Humanity. 

In  literature  as  in  Nature  there  is  continuity  of  de- 
velopment, and  the  germs  of  the  subjects  which  the 
new  poetry  of  any  generation  develops  into  full-foli- 
aged  trees  are  to  be  found  in  the  poetry  which  pre- 
ceded that  new  poetry.  The  poetry  of  Nature,  as 
fully  written  by  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  and  Keats,  had, 
as  it  were,  a  child-life  before  their  time.  The  theo- 
logical poetry  of  Browning,  of  Tennyson,  of  a  host 
of  minor  poets,  arose  out  of  certain  tendencies  of 
thought  and  emotion  which  were  expressed,  in  opposi- 
tion to  the  orthodox  theology  of  their  time,  by  Byron 
and  Shelley.  The  various  forms  of  the  poetry  of 
human  life,  and  especially  of  the  poetry  of  human 
progress,  which  the  poets  embodied  from  the  year  1830 
to  the  year  1870,  were  outlined,  as  it  were,  in  the  poetry 
of  the  first  thirty  years  of  this  century.  In  what  man- 
ner Tennyson  developed  the  poetry  of  Nature  is  a  fasci- 
nating subject ;  but  it  will  best  be  treated  in  connection 
with  his  poems.  What  he  did  with  regard  to  the  theo- 
logical shapes  which  emerged  in  his  time  has  already 
received  notice.  What  did  he  say  of  the  subjects  which 
belong  to  the  growth  of  humanity  towards  a  better 
society  ?  What  relation  did  he  bear  to  social  politics,  if 
I  may  use  that  term  ? 

With  the  impulse  given  by  Reform  in  1832,  a  number 


32  Tennyson 

of  questions  belonging  to  social  progress  were  reawak- 
ened into  a  fuller  life,  and  took  new  forms.  Was  the 
power  of  government  best  placed  in  the  hands  of  the 
whole  people,  or  in  the  hands  of  great  men  ?  It  is  plain 
that  Tennyson  answered  with  Carlyle  that  great  men 
(provided  they  had,  like  Wellington,  a  supreme  sense  of 
duty,  a  proviso  Carlyle  did  not  always  insert)  were  those 
in  whose  hands  power  should  dwell.  Freedom,  in  his 
conception  of  it,  was  safer  with  them.  The  voice  of 
the  people,  he  thought,  was  a  babbling  voice,  for  the 
people  were  led  by  mere  orators.  Tennyson  was  never 
democratic  at  heart.  He  never  understood  what  democ- 
racy in  its  reality  meant,  much  less  did  he  ever  conceive 
its  ideal.  He  was  always  an  aristocrat,  though  he  would 
have  said,  with  justice,  that  it  was  a  government  of  the 
best  men  that  he  desired,  and  not  a  government  of  rank 
and  birth  alone.  Rank  and  birth,  when  they  were  un- 
worthy of  their  privileged  position,  he  despised  and  de- 
nounced, because  they  were  inhuman.  But  I  do  not 
think  that  he  ever  wished  that  rank  should  be  dissolved, 
or  privileges  overthrown,  or  that  he  even  conceived  the 
idea  that  the  people  of  themselves  were  to  choose  the 
best  men.  He  saw  (from  his  poetic  point  of  view)  that 
all  men  were  equal  in  their  relations  to  the  common 
feelings  and  duties  of  the  race  ;  that  in  suffering,  in 
love,  in  the  desire  of  right  and  justice,  in  the  visions 
and  longings  of  youth  and  age,  there  was  an  eternal 
equality  ;  and,  like  all  the  great  poets,  his  work  in  this 
realm  of  thought  has  drawn  men  and  women  of   all 


Introduction  33 


ranks  and  classes  into  a  closer  sympathy  with  one  an- 
other, and  placed  them  hand  in  hand  on  a  common 
ground  of  humanity  ;  but  when  it  came  to  extending 
that  community  of  human  relationship  into  the  political 
or  the  social  sphere,  he  not  only  drew  back,  he  did  not 
understand  what  this  meant.  The  Republicanism  Avith 
which  Wordsworth  and  Coleridge  were  at  first  enchanted, 
and  from  which  they  afterwards  retreated  ;  the  revolu- 
tionary spirit  of  Byron  and  his  crusade  against  respecta- 
bility ;  the  more  deliberate  wrath  of  Shelley  with  the 
whole  of  the  idols  and  oppression  of  a  society  founded 
as  he  believed  on  caste  and  force  and  not  on  equality 
and  love,  were  one  and  all  wholly  unrepresented  by 
Tennyson,  nay,  they  were  implicitly  attacked  by  him. 
His  whole  conception  of  law  and  government,  and  of 
freedom,  excluded  them  from  its  circle.  Not  in  his 
hands,  then,  lay  the  development  of  the  seeds  which 
Shelley  had  scattered  in  his  manhood.  No,  nor  even 
those  which  Wordsworth  had  sown  in  his  youth.  He 
was  much  more,  on  this  side,  the  true  successor  of 
Keats,  to  whom  all  these  political  and  social  questions 
were,  because  of  their  apparent  ugHness,  repulsive  ;  and 
who  took  refuge  from  them  in  the  stories  of  the  Greeks 
and  of  the  Renaissance  out  of  which  time  had  with' 
drawn  the  coarse  and  left  the  beautiful.  But  Keats 
lived  at  a  time  when  there  was  no  national  emotion, 
when  men  were  really  weary  of  the  democratic  ideas, 
and  he   represents   that  weariness.     Tennyson,  on   the 

contrary,  did  live  in  a  time  of   national  emotion,  and 

a 


34  Tennyson 

though  he  partly  followed  Keats  in  a  retreat  to  the  past, 
yet  he  could  not  altogether,  even  had  he  desired  it, 
loosen  himself  from  the  excitement  which  encompassed 
him.  His  age  was  vividly  with  him,  and  he  wrote  of 
patriotism,  of  the  proper  conception  of  freedom,  of  the 
sad  condition  of  the  poor,  of  the  woman's  position  in 
the  onward  movement  of  the  world,  of  the  place  of 
commerce  and  science  in  that  movement,  of  war  as  the 
remedy  for  the  selfishness  and  evils  of  commerce,  and 
of  the  future  of  the  race.  These  are  the  main  things 
he  touched,  and  of  them  all  it  is  true  that  they  were 
questions  which  had  been  outlined  in  the  previous 
poetic  period,  and  outlined  in  the  new  forms  they  took 
after  1832. 

The  first  of  these  is  Patriotism. 

I  have  said  that  he  felt  strongly  the  vitality  of  the 
present  in  which  he  lived.  But  he  also  brought  into  the 
present  an  immense  reverence  for  the  past,  and  that  is 
one  of  the  strongest  foundations  of  his  patriotism.  The 
poem,  which  begins 

Love  thou  thy  land,  with  love  far-brought 
From  out  the  storied  Past, 

is  but  one  of  the  hundred  utterances,  the  note  of  which 
remained  the  same  clear  sound  from  the  beginning  to 
the  end.  It  was  a  pity  that  the  emotion  was  chiefly  given 
to  the  warlike  glories  of  England  by  land  and  sea,  and 
but  little  bestowed  on  the  long  and  more  glorious  though 
fameless  struggle  of  people  and  towns  for  civic  liberty  ; 


Introduction  35 


but  we  may  well  excuse  the  poet's  preference  for  valour 
and  for  death  in  behalf  of  the  honour  of  the  land  in  the 
striking  circumstance  of  war.  This  is  more  vivid  for 
verse,  and  The  Revenge :  A  Ballad  of  the  Fleet,  and  The 
Defence  of  Luc  know,  and  The  Charge  of  the  Light 
Brigade,  will  always  stir  English  hearts. 

Moreover,  no  one  has  better  dwelt  on  the  noble  ele- 
ments of  English  character,  their  long  descent  to  us 
from  the  past,  and  the  sacred  reverence  that  we  owe  to 
them,  than  Tennyson.  He  has  strengthened,  by  the  ex- 
pression of  this  reverence,  love  of  country  among  this 
people,  and  the  strength  he  has  thus  added  to  it  will 
endure  as  a  power  in  England.  It  will  be  more  than  a 
power.  It  will  be  a  voice  to  recall  us  to  reverence  when, 
in  the  push  onwards  to  a  future  liberty  and  in  the  heated 
atmosphere  of  that  strife,  we  tend  to  forget  how  much 
we  owe  to  the  ancient  forms  and  to  the  by-gone  men,  the 
results  of  whose  work  we  may  put  aside  as  unfitted  for 
the  present  time.  For  if  in  our  excitement  for  the  fu- 
ture we  lose  reverence  for  the  past,  the  loss  of  reverence 
will  so  injure  the  soul  of  the  nation  that  when  we  gain 
our  objects  in  the  time  to  come,  we  shall  not  be  able  to 
keep  them  nobly  or  to  use  them  rightly.  No  splendid 
future,  splendid  in  that  just  feeling  for  righteousness  and 
love  which  hinders  the  despotism  that  so  often  succeeds 
a  wholly  irreverent  revolution,  can  be  won  by  a  nation 
which  has  forgotten  veneration  for  its  magnanimous 
past.  The  work  of  Tennyson,  in  this  point  of  patriot- 
ism, is  altogether  fine  and  true. 


36  Tennyson 

Nevertheless,  it  had  its  extreme.  It  ran  sometimes 
into  an  English  Chauvinism,  and  in  this  extreme  Tenny- 
son became,  with  a  curious  reversion  to  the  type  of  the 
Englishmen  of  Nelson's  time,  the  natural  opponent,  even 
the  mocker  of  France  and  the  French  character.  The 
words  which,  at  the  end  of  The  Princess,  he  puts  into  the 
mouth  of  the  Tory  member's  son,  represent  a  part  of  his 
own  point  of  view,  though  they  are  modified  in  the  reply 
that  follows.     Phrases  like 

The  red  fool-fuiy  of  the  Seine, 

show  how  he  looked  on  the  passionate  forms  which  po- 
litical ideas  had  received  in  France,  and  the  one-sided 
view  he  took  of  our  neighbours'  character.  He  saw  only 
the  evil  of  these  things,  just  because  he  was  so  exclu- 
sively of  the  solid  English  type.  Now  and  again  the 
natural  variety  of  a  poet  made  him  attempt  to  see  the 
other  side,  as  in  the  answer  to  the  Tory  member's  son. 
But  it  was  against  the  grain.  He  saw  but  little  of  what 
France  has  done  for  us  ;  he  had  no  gratitude  to  her  for 
her  audacity,  her  swiftness,  her  logical  expansion  into 
form  of  the  thoughts  of  progress  ;  he  did  not  see  or  fee'i 
that  much  of  the  freedom  we  have  lately  won  was  owing 
to  England's  calm  contemplation,  with  a  certain  amount 
of  pleasurable  but  base  contempt,  of  the  mistakes  which 
France  alone  had  the  boldness  and  the  self-sacrifice  to 
make  for  the  world.  He  did  not  see  our  cool  acceptance 
of  the  results  for  liberty  which  emerged  after  the  mis- 
takes  of  France  had  run  their  course.     She  bore  the 


Introduction 


37 


consequences  of  her  mistakes,  but  in  exhausting  these 
she  set  the  true  form  of  certain  ideas  of  liberty  clear. 
We  take  the  ideas  she  has  set  free,  but  we  forget  that 
she  revealed  them.  There  has  been  no  ingratitude  so 
great  in  the  history  of  humanity  as  the  ingratitude  of 
Europe  to  France,  and  Tennyson  represented  with  great 
vividness  this  ingratitude  in  England. 

Hence,  or  rather  along  with  this,  he  did  not,  except 
now  and  then  in  vague  suggestions,  carry  the  love  of 
country  forward  into  the  love  of  mankind.  He  had  but 
little  sympathy  in  his  poetry  with  other  nations.  At 
this  point  he  is  far  behind  Coleridge,  Wordsworth. 
Byron,  and  Shelley.  The  only  struggles  for  freedom 
with  which  he  openly  sympathises  were  those  of  Poland 
in  his  youth,  and  of  Montenegro  in  his  age.  The  battie 
of  Italy  for  liberty  is  scarcely  mentioned.  The  struggle 
of  the  North  against  slavery  in  the  United  States  is 
never  touched.  Nor  could  he  write,  and  this  illustrates 
still  further  his  insulation,  as  Browning  wrote,  of  Italy, 
of  Spain,  of  France,  of  modern  Greece,  of  men  and 
women's  lives  away  from  England.  He  never  became 
international.  The  higher  conception  to  which  love  of 
our  own  nation  is  to  lead— the  love  of  all  nations  as 
contained  in  one  nation,  the  nation  of  Man — did  not 
shine  in  the  mind  of  Tennyson.  It  arose  into  clear 
form  with  the  French  Revolution  ;  it  has  taken  a  new 
and  a  better  form  in  modern  times,  but  none  of  its  de- 
velopments were  sympathised  with,  were  even  conceived 
by  Tennyson.     He  was  at  this  point  over-English.     He 


38  Tennyson 

is,  at  this  point,  out  of  sympathy  with  the  progress  of 
Man.  He  is  not,  at  this  point,  our  poet,  or  the  poet  of 
the  future. 

Again,  take  the  idea  of  human  freedom  ;  which, 
thrown  as  it  was  by  Shelley  into  the  arena  where  the 
young  emotions  of  the  present  contend  with  grey-haired 
theories  of  the  past,  became  a  much  more  actual  consid- 
eration in  all  national  life  after  1832.  That  idea  is  not 
only  freedom  to  speak  the  thing  we  will,  or  freedom  of 
act  or  contract,  or  such  national  liberty  only  as  all  Eng- 
lishmen enjoy — but  the  setting  free  of  all  members  of 
the  State  by  the  State  from  all  that  hinders  the  full 
development  of  every  citizen.  This  is  what  it  has  now 
become  within  the  last  thirty  years.  But  it  was  nothing 
like  that  in  1832.  It  was  a  bourgeois,  not  a  popular,  re- 
form which  was  then  initiated  ;  and  the  poor  were  as 
much  neglected  by  it,  as  the  middle  class  had  been  be- 
fore it.  But  the  disturbance  it  caused  extended  down- 
wards to  the  labouring  classes,  then  quite  uneducated  ; 
and  the  riots  and  excesses  that  arose  made  short-sighted 
persons  doubt  the  expediency  of  even  the  measure  of 
Reform  given  in  1832.  These  riots  and  violences  were 
caused  by  the  misery  and  by  the  neglect  of  the  poor, 
and  they  seemed  mere  mob-furies  to  men  of  a  quiet 
type,  like  Tennyson.  Such  men  felt  themselves  forced 
to  consider  over  again  the  idea  of  freedom  ;  and  the 
reaction  from  what  seemed  revolutionary  action  on  the 
one  side,  and  on  the  other  side  from  Utopias  like  Shel- 
ley's, was  extreme. 


Introduction  39 


One  would  have  thought  that  a  poet,  touched  by  the 
reality  of  misery  and  its  exceeding  bitter  cry,  would 
have  held  the  balance  equally  poised  at  least,  and  not 
yielded  too  far  to  the  reaction  ;  that  he  would  have  had 
indignation  at  the  state  of  society,  and  been  inwardly 
urged  to  give,  in  the  manner  of  a  prophet,  some  predic- 
tion of  a  hope  near  at  hand  for  the  woes  and  weakness 
of  the  oppressed.  But  though  there  are  many  passages 
where  Tennyson  does  try  to  hold  an  equal  balance,  and 
to  excuse  or  even  to  advocate  the  impassioned  rising  of 
the  oppressed  in  speech  or  act  against  their  fate,  these 
passages  are  short,  are  tentative  ;  he  is,  as  it  were,  forced 
into  them  ;  and  the  main  line  he  takes  is  the  line  of 
careful  protection  of  the  old  against  the  onset  of  the 
new,  of  steady  but  very  prudent  advance  through  obe- 
dience to  existing  law,  of  protest  against  that  which  he 
calls  "  raw  haste,"  of  discouraging  of  indignant  speech 
and  act  on  the  part  of  the  people,  of  distrust,  even  of 
contempt,  for  what  seemed  to  him  the  mob  and  for  their 
"  lawless  din  "  ;  and,  in  consequence  of  all  this,  he  puts 
off  the  regeneration  of  society  to  a  period  so  far  away 
that  it  may  be  counted  by  thousands  and  thousands  of 
years.  It  is  with  almost  a  scientific  analysis  of  the  whole 
question  of  the  future  society,  and  with  arguments 
drawn  from  geology  (as  it  humanity  were  in  close  anal- 
ogy to  Nature),  that  he  predicts  the  enormous  time  in 
which  the  betterment  or  the  perfection  of  society  will 
be  wrought.  He  had  really  little  or  no  faith  in  man  as 
man,  but  he  had  faith  in  man  as  conducted,  in  reasona- 


40  Tennyson 

ble  obedience,  to  the  final  restitution  by  an  entity  which 
he  called  law,  and  which  was,  in  reality,  his  own  con- 
ception of  the  Constitution  of  England  built  up  into 
power,  not  by  the  people,  but  by  a  few  great  men  and 
by  the  bulk  of  the  educated  and  landed  classes  who 
alone  were  fit  to  direct  the  blind  forces  of  the  people. 
I  do  not  say  that  he  did  not  slide  out  of  this  position 
here  and  there  in  his  poetry.  He  could  scarcely  help  it 
as  a  poet,  but  nevertheless  this  was  his  main  position, 
and  on  the  whole  he  kept  to  it  all  his  life.  It  was  not 
altogether  his  standing-place  when  he  was  young.  A 
different  spirit  inflames  the  lines  which  begin  : 

And  Freedom  rear'd  in  that  august  sunrise 

Her  beautiful  bold  brow, 
When  rites  and  forms  before  his  burning  eyes 

Melted  like  snow. 

That,  and  the  rest  of  them,  smack  of  the  passionate 

poet.     But   this  vague   fire    did  not  last.     A  batch  of 

poems  :     You   ask   me  %vhy  thd  ill  at  ease — Of  old  sat 

Freedom  on  the  heights — Love  thou  thy  laud — mark  his  new 

position— that  of  a  man  who,  like  the  constitution  of  a 

land 

Where  freedom  slowly  broadens  down 
From  precedent  to  precedent, 

"  regards  gradation,  lest  the  soul  of  Discord  race  the 
rising  wind,"  and  sits  (distrusting  all  that  is  not  accu- 
rately balanced,  all  that  shares  in  political  emotion 
whether  of  wrath  or  eager  love)  apart  from  those 
stormier    miseries  of  man  which  seem  to  double  when- 


Introduction  41 


ever  men  eagerly  desire  for  their  lives  a  greater  freedom 
of  development.  I  do  not  presume  to  blame  him  for 
this.  On  the  contrary,  this  position  towards  the  prog- 
ress of  man  in  freedom,  this  "  nor  swift,  nor  slow  to 
change,  but  firm  "  ;  this  quiet  maturing,  in  self-control, 
of  liberty  ;  make  this  close  respect  for  law  a  standing- 
place  necessary  to  be  preserved.  It  is,  in  fact,  that  of 
the  sturdy  good  sense  of  England,  led  to  this  conclusion 
by  careful  reasoning  on  the  past,  and  by  an  intellectual 
analysis  of  the  course  of  its  history.  I  should  be  very 
sorry  to  lose  the  ballast  of  the  boat. 

But  when  it  is  the  only  position  taken  up  by  the  army 
of  freedom,  it  ends  in  the  overwhelming  of  freedom  for 
a  time.  It  becomes  blind  and  deaf  to  the  woes  of  man. 
And  it  is  always  a  position  in  which  it  is  surprising  to 
find  a  poet.  One  would  think  that  he  would  naturally 
be  in  the  other  great  division  of  the  army  of  freedom — 
on  the  side  of  the  inarticulate  emotions  of  the  people — 
supporting  that  struggle  for  freedom  of  growth  which  is 
inspired  by  indignation  against  oppression,  or  by  im- 
pulsive pity  which  rushes  into  act  ;  which  is  driven  on 
by  faiths  which  do  not  argue  ;  by  hopes  which  have 
little  ground  in  experience  ;  by  aspirations  towards  all 
that  at  present  seems  impossible  ;  by  the  fire  of  the 
greater  passions  whose  speech  and  deeds  seem  madness 
to  the  steady  world.  This  is  the  side  which  the  poet, 
when  he  thinks  of  freedom  for  man,  naturally  takes. 
Wordsworth  took  it,  Coleridge  took  it,  Byron  took  it, 
Shelley  took  it,  Browning  took  it,  but — Tennyson  did 


42  Tennyson 

not  !  His  was  the  view  of  the  common-sense,  well> 
ordered  Englishman — of  Whiggism  in  her  carriage  with 
a  very  gracious  smile  and  salute  for  Conservatism  in  hers 
— and  he  tried,  unhappily  as  I  think,  to  get  this  view 
into  poetry. 

Through  the  whole  of  Tennyson's  poetry  about  the 
problem  of  man's  progress,  this  view  of  his  does  damage 
to  the  poetry  ;  lowers  the  note  of  beauty,  of  aspiration, 
of  fire,  of  passion  ;  and  lessens  the  use  of  his  poetry 
to  the  cause  of  freedom.  If  the  poet  take  the  unpoetic 
side  of  any  question  he  gives  no  help  to  mankind,  so  far 
as  the  question  concerns  mankind.  The  same  things 
said  in  prose  are  very  good  sense,  and  in  harmony  with 
their  vehicle.  But,  said  in  poetry,  they  sound  wrong  ; 
they  seem  unnatural  ;  and  they  harm  the  cause  they 
intend  to  support.  It  had  been  far  more  right  and 
natural,  had  Tennyson  taken  up  the  other  side — a  side 
just  as  necessary,  even  more  necessary,  for  the  advance 
of  human  freedom  than  the  side  of  cautious  and  lawful 
development  of  liberty — the  side  of  the  rushers,  of  the 
enthusiastic  seekers,  of  the  wild  warriors,  of  the  sacrifi- 
cers  whom  the  world  calls  insane,  of  the  indignant  men 
whose  speech  and  action  Tennyson  thought  were  "  blind 
hysterics  of  the  Celt."  That  way  poetry  lies  :  and  that 
way  lies  the  permanent  influence  of  a  poet  on  humanity, 
so  far  as  this  question  is  concerned. 

This  unfortunate  position — not  in  itself,  for  I  have 
maintained  it  as  quite  a  true  position  for  one  half  of 
the  army  of  freedom  to  support,  but  unfortunate  for  a 


Introduction  43 


poet — threw  his  poetry  on  matters  related  to  the  full  and 
free  development  of  mankind  out  of  gear.  He  some- 
times got  curiously  in  the  wrong,  as  on  the  subject  of  war. 
He  became  unpoetically  hopeless  with  regard  to  the 
future,  wavering  to  and  fro  without  any  fixed  or  luminous 
faith  in  progress  ;  having  a  distant  and  half  laissez  faire 
sympathy  with  the  sorrows  of  the  people,  and  seeing — 
and  this  is  the  strangest  of  all — a  remedy  for  their  sor- 
rows in  the  greater  growth  of  commerce  as  it  exists  at 
present,  and  in  the  further  development  of  practical 
science  hand  in  hand  with  commerce.  When  we  read 
these  things  in  poetry  we  say  :  "  Why,  this  is  wondrous 
strange  !  " 

When  he  does  express  indignation  for  the  miseries  of 
the  poor  and  against  the  cause  of  them — the  unbridled 
competition  of  commerce — he  puts  that  indignation  into 
the  mouth  of  the  half-hysterical  and  morbid  lover  of 
Maud,  or  into  the  mouth  of  the  lover  in  Locksley  Hall, 
when  he  has  grown  old.  Moreover,  he  does  not  speak 
from  himself,  but  in  the  voice  of  the  characters  he  draws, 
men  wanting  in  "  self-reverence,  self-knowledge,  self- 
control."  A  false  light  is  thus  thrown  on  the  sorrows 
of  the  poor.  It  is  as  if  half  of  them  existed  only  in  the 
morbid  fancies  of  men.  At  least,  there  is  no  vital  sym- 
pathy expressed  for  them  ;  and,  indeed,  Tennyson  lived 
aparLfrom  this  suffering  world  and  knew  nothing  about 
it.  He  vaguely  sees  that  ruthless  competition  is  at  the 
bottom  of  these  evils,  but  he  looks  for  the  extension  of 
that  system  of  commerce  which  is  based  on  and  makes 


44  Tennyson 

competition  as  one  of  the  main  elements  in  the  fully 
developed  happiness  of  mankind.  He  vaguely  sees 
that  mechanical  science  has  been  made  the  slave  of 
competition,  and  has  increased,  through  this  unhappy 
union,  the  troubles  at  the  bottom  of  society,  but  he 
looks  for  the  fuller  development  of  the  present  system 
by  science  as  one  of  the  means  of  redeeming  these 
evils.  He  sees  plainly  that  the  world  is  wrong,  but  he 
seems  to  think  that  it  is  to  be  cured  by  the  slow  and 
steady  improvement  of  the  present  social  and  com- 
mercial system,  tempered,  when  it  gets  too  bad,  by  wars. 
He  sees,  or  Maud's  lover  sees,  that  this  system  leads 
to  organised  selfishness  ;  that  men  become,  under  it, 
materialised  ;  that  the  higher  qualities  of  the  heart  and 
soul  are  crushed  by  it — and  this  is  the  subject  of  the  be- 
ginning  of  Maud^  and  of  a  few  other  poems.  What  is  his 
remedy  ?  Not  the  abandonment  of  the  system,  and  not 
a  crusade  against  the  causes  of  these  evils,  not  even  any 
legislative  attempt  to  lessen  them,  but  a  war,  in  which 
"  commerce  should  not  be  all  in  all,  and  noble  thought 
be  freer  under  the  sun,"  in  which  men  should  "  feel  with 
their  native  land,  and  be  one  with  their  kind,"  in  which 
the  desire  of  self-sacrifice  should  again  awake  in  the 
i^  country.  Of  all  means  of  cure  suggested  for  the  evils 
of  competition,  war  is  the  most  foolish,  and  it  doubles 
the  misfortunes  of  the  poor.  Those  who  are  sacrificed 
the  most  in  battle,  and  tortured  to  death  by  thousands, 
and  who  get  none  of  the  personal  glory,  are  the  poor. 
The  taxes  are  doubled,  and  the  doubling  falls  heaviest 


Introduction 


45 


on  the  poor.  The  competition  and  the  cheating  of  those 
capitahsts  who  happen  to  desire  to  increase  their  store 
at  any  cost  are  increased  in  war-time.  The  selfish  are 
made  more  selfish  ;  the  troubles  of  the  poor  workmen 
are  trebled  ;  the  army  suffers  and  starves,  and  dies  of 
cold  and  misery — as  we  found  out,  only  too  well,  in  the 
Crimean  war.     A  costly  medicine  it  was  ! 

This  is  not  the  way  to  remedy  the  ills  of  the  people, 
nor  is  it  the  best  way  to  develop  self-sacrifice,  noble 
thought,  civic  honour  or  justice  in  a  people.  There  is 
another  way  in  which  the  call  for  civic  self-sacrifice  en- 
ters into  the  daily  and  hourly  life  of  every  citizen  ;  but 
that  way,  which  forms  now  the  basis  of  all  action  and 
prophecy  towards  a  nobler  society,  did  not  enter  into 
the  poetry  of  Tennyson  at  all,  and  its  absence  left  him 
no  expedient  for  curing  a  selfish  society  but  the  clumsy 
expedient  of  war. 

I  make  no  complaint  against  Tennyson  for  all  this.  I 
only  state  the  case.  If  he  was  of  this  temper,  it  was 
because  it  was  mainly  the  temper  of  the  time  in  which 
he  grew  to  his  maturity,  the  thirty  years  from  his  first 
volume  to  the  end  of  the  sixties.  He  represented  the 
political  and  social  opinions  of  that  time  very  fairly,  but 
not  as  a  poet  who  had  much  prophetic  fire  and  pity  in 
him  would  be  expected  to  write.  Nor  did  he  make  any 
impetuous  casts  into  the  future  when  he  wrote  of  these 
things,  save  once  in  Locksley  Hall.  In  these  matters,  he 
was  not  before  his  age,  nor  when  the  age  changed  did 
he   change   with    it.     He  remained    for   another  thirty 


46  Tennyson 

years  in  precisely  the  same  position,  while  the  world 
changed  round  him.  His  poetry  on  other  matters  con- 
tinued to  exalt  and  console  the  world,  to  illuminate  it 
with  beauty  and  grace  and  tender  thought.  He  has  been 
a  blessing  to  us  all  in  a  thousand  ways  in  these  last 
thirty  years.  But  on  the  matters  of  which  I  treat  of 
here,  he  was  either  silent  or  in  opposition  to  the  ideas  of 
a  higher  liberty.  Collectivism,  for  example,  which  be- 
gan to  grow  up  about  1866  (which,  while  it  was  in  op- 
position to  the  individualism  which  so  rapidly  developed 
after  1832,  yet  holds  in  it  a  much  greater  opportunity 
for  complete  individuality  than  we  have  even  conceived 
as  yet)  does  not  seem  to  have  even  dawned  on  the  mind 
of  Tennyson.  He  is  behind  the  whole  of  this  move- 
ment— the  master  movement  of  our  time.  In  matters 
then  of  this  kind  he  is  not  the  poet  of  the  people.  He 
is  our  poet  in  the  things  which  he  treated  poetically  ; 
and  in  those  which  have  to  do  with  Nature  and  God  and 
the  sweet,  honest  and  tender  life  of  men  and  women, 
he  will  remain  our  poet  as  long  as  the  language  lasts,  but 
in  these  social  matters  not.  One  only  subject  of  this 
kind  he  treated  well  and  as  a  poet,  and  that  was  the 
question  of  woman  and  her  relation  to  modern  life  ;  a 
question  which  was  started  by  Shelley,  and  which  occu- 
pied a  great  place  in  poetry  after  1832.  As  far  as  he 
saw  into  that  matter,  he  saw  it  with  freedom  and  clear- 
ness and  love,  and  The  Princess  is  a  real  contribution  to 
that  subject.  But  that  stands  alone.  In  all  other  mat- 
ters belonging  to   the  progress   of  society,  he  does  not 


Introduction 


47 


belong  to  the  last  thirty  years,  to  our  time,  our  hopes,  or 
our  faith  ;  nor  does  he  think  and  feel  in  them  as  a  poet. 
Look,  in  conclusion,  at  the  faith  he  had  concerning 
the  future  of  mankind,  at  the  hopes  he  entertained  for 
it.  Was  he  swept  away,  as  the  poets  are,  into  high  pre- 
diction ?  Did  he  realise  by  faith  that  a  better  time 
might  be  near  at  hand  ?  No,  embayed  in  these  con- 
servative doctrines,  unable  to  loosen  himself  from  their 
ice,  he  had  enough  of  the  logic  of  a  poet  to  see  that, 
supposing  they  were  all  true,  the  progress  of  society 
towards  a  better  and  a  perfect  life  must  be  of  almost  an 
infinite  slowness  ;  so  very  slow,  so  very  far  away,  that 
man  in  the  present  is  left  all  but  hopeless.  There  is 
nothing  in  Tennyson  in  this  matter  of  the  rush  or  the 
faith  of  the  prophet.  The  impulse  he  gives  is  faint,  and 
his  hope  is  only  too  like  despair.  The  young  man  of 
Locksley  Hall  repents  when  he  is  old  of  almost  all  the 
enthusiasms  of  his  youth  : 

Forward  far  and  far  from  here  is  all  the  hope  of  eighty  years. 

In  the  very  last  book,  the  "  Ghost  of  the  brute  "  in 
men  may  be  laid,  but  only  in  a  hundred  thousand  years, 
or  in  a  million  summers  away.  Before  the  crowning 
age  arrive  in  the  making  of  man,  aeon  after  aeon  shall 
pass.  "  We  are  far  from  the  noon  of  man,  there  is  time 
for  the  race  to  grow." 

Time  !  when  half  the  world  and  more  are  in  torture  ! 
It  ought  not  to  be  in  a  poet  to  take  things  so  easily.     It 


48  Tennyson 

is  true  that  Tennyson  looks  beyond  this  world,  and  sees 
the  sorrowful  made  blessed  there,  and,  indeed.  I  hold 
that  to  be  the  truest  of  consolations.  But  if  it  is  to  make 
us  take  evils  easily  here — we  especially  who  are  com- 
fortable— I  hold  that  it  is  not  unwise  to  put  it  out  of  our 
minds  for  a  time  ;  and  it  may  be  that  the  general  disbe- 
lief in  immortality  has  its  deepest  ground  in  that  feeling, 
and  perhaps  its  reason.  For  my  part,  I  do  not  think  we 
have  any  right  to  think  of  a  heaven  for  others,  much  less 
of  a  heaven  for  ourselves  in  the  world  to  come,  until  we 
are  wholly  determined  to  make  this  world  a  heaven  for 
our  fellow-men,  and  are  hoping,  believing,  loving,  and 
working  for  that,  and  for  its  realisation  not  in  a  thousand 
or  a  million  years,  but  in  a  nearer  and  a  nearer  future. 
That  is  what  a  poet  should  feel  and  write  for  nowadays. 
That  should  be  the  passion  in  his  heart  and  the  fire  in 
his  verse. 


#" 


CHAPTER  I 

THE   POEMS   OF    183O 

IT  is  fortunate  for  the  historian  of  poetry  in  this  century 
that  the  close  of  each  school  of  poetry  is  so  clearly 

divided  from  the  rise  of  its  successor.  Shelley, 
Byron,  and  Keats  died  within  a  few  years  of  each 
other,  between  1821  and  1824.  Wordsworth,  Coleridge, 
Southey,  Landor,  and  Walter  Scott  (though  they  lived 
beyond  1824)  belonged  to  a  school  which  preceded 
that  of  Byron,  Shelley,  and  Keats.  They  overlapped  the 
lives  of  these  three  poets,  but  all  the  three  had  arisen 
when  Wordsworth  and  the  rest  had  done  their  best  work. 
They  represent  other  spheres  of  thought,  and  embody 
other  worlds  of  emotion.  Byron,  enamoured  of  his  own 
powerful  personality,  and  rejoicing  in  his  isolation  from 
the  crowd  while  he  was  angry  with  its  attack  upon  him, 
proud  and  vain  at  the  same  time,  laughed  to  scorn  the 
peaceful,  proper,  prim,  and  comfortable  life  into  which 
the  English  middle  class  had  subsided  after  the  peace  of 
1 815,  and  held  up  himself  as  its  poetic  contrast — the 
lonely,  soul-shattered  wanderer  whom  a  quiet  home-life 

4  49 


50  Tennyson 

revolted,  who  preferred,  for  choice,  to  live  like  the  Giaour 
or  the  Corsair — and  who  finally  attacked  all  the  respect- 
able hypocrisy  of  England  in  the  revolutionary  mockery 
of  Don  yuan.  He  did  this  needful  work  with  exaggera- 
tion, but  had  it  not  been  done  with  exaggeration,  it  would 
not  perhaps  have  rescued  England's  poetry  from  the  ideal 
of  Georg'e  III.  No  temper  can  be  a  greater  contrast  than 
Byron's  on  the  one  side  to  that  of  his  predecessor,  Words- 
worth, and  on  the  other  to  that  of  his  successor,  Tennyson. 
Byron  did  not  like — and  I  put  it  mildly — the  philosophic 
gentlemen  of  The  Excursion  ;  he  would  have  disliked 
still  more  the  Arthur  of  the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Indeed, 
it  was  high  time,  when  poetry  in  the  hands  of  Tennyson 
had  dwelt  so  much  on  the  conservative,  law-abiding, 
and  regular  elements  of  life  as  to  make  us  fear  that 
the  more  audacious  and  freer  elements  beyond  conven- 
tional society  would  be  lost  to  poetry,  that  Swinburne 
should  again,  like  Byron,  bring  in  the  revolutionary  spirit, 
and  attack  that  temper  in  poetry  which,  in  weaker  hands 
than  Tennyson's,  might  again  degenerate  into  Pharisa- 
ism and  put  the  imagination  into  a  coop  like  a  goose 
at  Strasbourg.  The  way  Swinburne  did  it  in  his  youth 
was  open  to  objections — poets,  by  their  very  nature, 
sweep  into  wild  exaggeration  of  their  revolts — but  it  was 
well  that  it  was  done.  Byron  did  the  same  thing  in  his 
time.  He  was  at  this  point  the  child  of  the  literature 
which  preceded  the  Revolution.  His  movement  of  mind 
and  emotion  is  part  of  the  storm  which  began  to  blow 
in  the  eighteenth  century. 


The  Poems  of   1830  51 

Shelley  was  also  its  child,  but  he  represented  his  parent 
in  a  very  different  manner  from   Byron.     He  was   not 
personal ;  he  did  not  attack   the  existing  society  with 
mockery.     He  did  not  praise  the  isolated  or  the  corsair 
life,  nor  the  immoral  life.     He  lived  as  he  pleased,  it  is 
true,  and  he  left  English  society  severely  alone.     But  he 
was  concerned  chiefly  with  ideas,  and  what  he  attacked 
were  the  evil  things  which  hindered  the  progress  of  man- 
kind.    He  hated  despotisms  ;  he  hated  those  religious 
views  which  enslaved   the  soul,  and  those  persons  who 
used  these  views  for  the  sake  of  power.     As  such,  he 
went  back,  when  the  political  aim  of  the  Revolution  was 
dead  in  England,  to  the  original  ideas  of  the  Revolution. 
He  took  up  their  all  but  extinguished  torch,  and  waved 
it  round  and    round  his   head,  till  in  his  hands  it  took 
fire  again.     It  was  only  for  a  time.     He  had  not  power 
enough  to  keep  it  kindled,  and  finally  he  left  behind  him 
all  hope  of  realising  in  his  own  time  the  ideas  of  equality. 
What  he  did  do,  was  to  conceive  in   his  own  mind  the 
regeneration  of  society  and  the  overthrow  of  its  evils  ; 
and  to  sing  of  what  humanity  would  be  in  the  future  ; 
and  it   is  his  undying  hope  in  this  regeneration  of  man, 
his  faith  and  love  of  it,  and  the  power  with  which  he 
has  infused  it  into  men,  for  which  we  owe  him  an  endless 
gratitude. 

This  was  the  last  effort  of  this  school  of  poetry  ap- 
plied to  the  conditions  of  the  world  of  its  own  time,  the 
last  recognition  these  poets  gave  to  their  present.  It 
was  also  the  last  breath   for   the  time  of  the  impulse 


52  Tennyson 

given  to  song  by  the  early  ideas  of  the  Revokition.  The 
poetry  of  this  century,  up  to  this  point,  had  been  fre- 
quently concerned  with  the  social  and  political  move- 
ment, with  the  European  struggle,  with  ethical  or  theo- 
logical forms  of  thought,  with  the  life  and  feelings  of 
the  poor,  with  the  glory  of  the  past,  with  humanity  at 
large,  with  philosophies  and  theories  of  the  race  and 
its  destiny.  But  now  poetry  ceased  to  speak  of  these 
matters.  And  no  wonder  !  The  poets  received  no  im- 
pulse from  without.  There  was  no  care  for  an  ideal  life 
left  in  England,  no  interest  in  the  future  condition  of  man, 
no  enthusiasm  of  humanity.  England  was  sick  of  social, 
political,  and  theological  matters,  of  theories  of  life. 
"  Let  me  alone,"  it  said,  "  torment  me  not  ;  "  and  it 
fell  into  a  materialism  which  stopped  its  ears  to  every 
voice  likely  to  disturb  its  dull  repose.  Wordsworth 
felt  this  even  in  1806,  ten  years  before  its  fulness,  when 
he  wrote  that  sonnet  on  the  besotted  state  of  the  country — 

The  world  is  too  much  with  us  :  late  and  soon, 
Getting  and  spending,  we  lay  waste  our  powers  : 
Little  we  see  in  Nature  that  is  ours  ; 
We  have  given  our  hearts  away — a  sordid  boon  ! 

a  sonnet  which  ends,  having  declared  that  mankind  was 
out  of  tune  with  natural  beauty,  in  one  of  his  rare  out- 
bursts of  passion — a  cry  for  deliverance  from  a  stagnant 
world — 

Great  God  !  I  'd  rather  be 
A  Pagan  suckled  in  a  creed  outworn  ; 
So  might  I,  standing  on  this  pleasant  lea, 


The  Poems  of  1830  53 

Have  glimpses  that  would  make  me  less  forlorn  ; 
Have  sight  of  Proteus  rising  from  the  sea  ; 
Or  hear  old  Triton  blow  his  wreathed  horn. 

Keats  felt  the  same  loss  of  joy  and  life  in  the  world 
with  a  shock  of  misery,  and  expressed  it.  "  Glory  and 
loveliness,"  he  cried,  "  have  passed  away."  What  did 
he  do  ?  The  present  said  nothing  to  his  imagination. 
No  wind  from  it  blew  upon  his  soul  and  awakened  the 
flowers  in  its  garden.  He  had  no  care  for  the  theolo- 
gies, for  social  theories,  for  humanity  at  large,  for  its 
future  destiny.  Living  alongside  of  Byron  and  Shelley, 
he  had  nothing  to  do  with  their  interests.  He  was, 
practically,  living  after  them,  in  a  world  which  did  not 
share  in  a  single  one  of  their  emotions.  But  emotions 
are  necessary  to  a  poet,  and  if  he  cannot  get  them  in  the 
present,  and  if  the  future  be  nothing  to  him,  as  it  is 
nothing  to  the  man  who  is  not  excited  by  the  present, 
he  must  seek  for  his  emotions  in  the  past.  There,  in 
that  bygone  world,  is  the  beauty,  or  the  romance, 
which  he  cannot  find  beside  him  ;  or  there,  at  least,  he 
sees  and  feels  it.  It  was  in  the  past  that  Keats  chose  to 
live,  quite  away  from  England.  The  Pagan  world  to 
which  Wordsworth  wished  to  return  in  his  temporary 
passion,  Keats  always  desired  to  have  with  him.  He 
sang  of  Endymion  in  the  woods  and  caves  of  Latmos. 
He  sang  of  young  life  at  Athens  ;  he  sang  of  a  more 
ancient  world  and  of  the  primeval  gods.  He  sang  of 
Lorenzo  and  Isabella  in  mediaeval  Florence ;  he  sang 
of    Porphyro    and    Madeline    in    a  world    which   has 


54  Tennyson 

no  history.  And  the  only  thing  he  saw  in  the  present 
which  was  worth  a  song  was  the  doings  of  Nature, 
whose  youth  is  everlastingly  lovely,  and  who  has  nothing 
to  do  with  man. 

His  poetry,  therefore,  represents  the  complete  ex- 
haustion of  the  fire  of  the  Revolution,  the  complete 
abandonment  of  the  present  as  able  to  give  any  impulse 
to  the  poet ;  and  if  no  new  impulse  had  come  to  stir 
England  to  her  depths,  to  place  all  the  old  problems 
in  a  new  light,  which  light  also  brought  with  it  a  kind- 
ling fire,  to  awaken  new  interest  in  the  life  of  the  pres- 
ent and  in  the  strife  of  humanity  to  its  goal,  poetry 
would  have  altogether  ceased  after  Keats.  The  past 
alone  does  not  supply  enough  fuel  to  keep  up  the  fires 
of  the  imagination. 

And,  indeed,  we  see  that  plainly  enough  in  the  his- 
tory of  the  time.  No  poet  of  any  vivid  eagerness, 
much  less  of  any  originality,  appeared  now  for  some 
years.  The  poetry  which  was  produced,  with  the  single 
exceptions  of  Landor,  and  of  Wordsworth  (whose  work, 
though  it  had  lost  youth,  was  still  weighty  with  power 
and  grave  sentiment),  was  either  an  imitation  of  past 
models,  or  pale,  pretty,  washed-out  work  like  that  of 
Mrs.  Hemans,  with  an  easy  melody  and  a  slipshod  senti- 
ment. Every  one  knew  the  methods,  the  images,  the 
very  rhymes  that  were  used.  All  was  convention, 
naught  was  art. 

The  Poems  of  Two  Brothers,  written  by  Alfred 
Tennyson   and  his   brother,  and  published  in    1827 — a 


The   Poems  of   1830  55 

collection  of  their  very  youthful  efforts — illustrate  this 
point.  They  are  without  one  trace  of  originality,  force, 
or  freshness — faded  imitations  of  previous  poets,  chiefly 
of  Byron  ;  or,  where  not  imitative,  full  of  the  futile  mod- 
esty of  boyhood,  which  would  fain  be  vain  but  does  not 
dare  ;  made  up  partly  of  bold  noise  and  partly  of  senti- 
mentality, accurately  true  to  the  type  of  the  English 
poetry  between  the  death  of  Shelley  and  the  publication 
of  Tennyson's  volume  of  1830.  It  is  one  of  the  literary 
puzzles  of  the  world  that  certain  great  poets,  as,  for 
example,  Shelley  and  here  Tennyson,  write  trash  in 
their  boyhood  ;  and  within  a  year  or  two  step  on  to  a 
level  of  original  power.  What  happens  in  the  meantime 
to  make  the  change  ?  It  is  not  as  if  these  boyish  poems 
were  only  poor  work.  Shelley's  verses  before  Queen  Mab 
were  detestable.  Tennyson's  verses  in  the  Poems  of 
Two  Brothers^  were  only  not  quite  so  bad.  But  they 
were  in  complete  harmony  with  the  poetry  of  the  time. 

Along  with  this  dishevelled  work  there  was  a  wonder- 
ful flourishing  of  criticism.  Reviews  and  weekly  papers 
explained  what  poetry  was,  and  slashed  and  praised  the 
poets  past,  present,  and  even  to  come.  The  more  poetry 
decayed,  the  more  eagerly  the  critics  dissected  her  body, 
till,  when  any  living  poetry  really  appeared,  they  (having 
been  accustomed  to  the  lifeless  poetry)  cried  out  at  the 
living  thing  as  something  too  horrible  to  be  endured. 
This  is  the  fate  and  the  punishment  of  criticism  of  the 
Arts  done  for  the  sake  of  criticism.  The  more,  then, 
the  critics  think  they    see,  the   blinder  they    become. 


56  Tennyson 

Along  with  this  there  was  necessarily  a  highly  cultured 
literary  class,  who  were  indeed  chiefly  made  up  of  the 
critics,  and  who  wrote  incessantly  about  literature,  but 
rarely  created  any — just  such  a  class  as  exists  to-day  revel- 
ling in  their  academic  excellence  ;  who  do  two  things, 
both  equally  foolish,  overblame  what  is  new,  or  over- 
praise it  ;  having  special  enmities  or  special  affec- 
tions, and  equally  damaging  those  they  abuse  and  those 
they  praise.  The  one  thing  of  which,  as  a  body,  they 
are  almost  incapable,  is  the  recognition  of  that  which  is 
really  good,  which  has  in  it  life,  continuance,  and  power. 
As  only  one  or  two  men  (and  those  poets  themselves) 
saw  what  was  in  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  or  Keats  when  they 
published  their  second  volumes,  so  only  one  or  two 
saw  what  was  in  the  earlier  volumes  of  Tennyson  and 
Browning. 

Tennyson's  poems  of  1830  were,  with  the  exception  of 
about  a  dozen,  very  much  like  the  other  poetry  of 
the  time.  But  those  new  things  set  Tennyson  apart. 
He  who  wrote  them  was  quite  certain  to  write  better 
and  better  poetry.  They  were  original  in  their  metre 
(which  was  poor),  in  word-painting,  in  the  use  of  words, 
in  thought,  and  in  the  way  in  which  emotion  was  reached 
and  seized  and  shaped.  The  same  originality,  but  to  a 
greater  degree,  belongs  to  Browning's  first  poem.  My 
business,  however,  is  Tennyson,  and  1  will  now  place, 
in  connection  with  what  I  have  said,  his  earliest  emer- 
gence as  an  original  poet.  That  emergence  is  first 
seen  in  the  Cambridge  Prize  Poem — 1829 — of  Timbuctoo, 


The   Poems  of   1830  57 

and  in  The  Lover's  Tale,  written  the  year  before,  when 
he  was  nineteen  years  old.  Tennyson  withdrew  The 
Lover  s  Tale  from  publication  after  he  had  printed 
it  in  1833,  but  on  its  being  pirated  in  1879,  published  it 
with  its  continuation,  The  Golden  Supper,  in  1879.  The 
poem  tells  of  a  boy  and  a  girl  who  are  brought  up  to- 
gether. The  boy  falls  into  passionate  love  with  the 
girl  ;  the  girl  cares  for  him  only  as  a  sister  and  tells  him 
in  her  innocent  confidence  that  she  loves  his  friend 
Lionel.  The  misery  of  this  to  the  boy  is  the  whole  sub- 
ject of  the  poem.  It  is  full  of  the  metaphysics  of  sor- 
row, and  of  the  fantastic  play  of  words  and  thouglits  with 
which  the  Elizabethans  described  the  poetry  of  unhappy 
love.  It  seems  plain  from  many  passages  that  Tennyson 
had  read  at  this  time  the  Sonnets  of  the  Amourists,  and 
the  work  of  the  love-poets  of  the  age  of  James  the  First. 
Here  is  one  of  these  passages  : 


It  was  ill-done  to  part  you,  Sisters  fair  ; 

Love's  arms  were  wreath'd  about  the  neck  of  Hope, 

And  Hope  kiss'd  Love,  and  Love  drew  in  her  breath 

In  that  close  kiss,  and  drank  her  whisper'd  tales. 

They  said  that  Love  would  die  when  Hope  was  gone, 

And  Love  mourn'd  long,  and  sorrow'd  after  Hope  ; 

At  last  she  sought  out  Memory,  and  they  trod 

The  same  old  paths  where  Love  had  walk'd  with  Hope, 

And  Memory  fed  the  soul  of  Love  with  tears. 


This  metaphysic  of  fantasy — an  embroidery  of  the  per- 
sonified passions  as  on  a  tapestry,  and  represented  in 
successive   pictures — does    not  stand  alone.     It   is  fre- 


58  Tennyson 

quent  in  this  early  poem,  and  it  became  in  after-times, 
but  greatly  improved  in  its  usage,  a  habit  of  the  poet. 
Many  instances  of  it  occur  in  In  Memoriam. 

The  lover's  sorrow  is  also  mingled  up  with  Nature. 
Every  natural  description  illustrates  and  reflects  the 
changing  moods  of  the  characters  :  so  early  did  Tenny- 
son begin  this  consistent  habit  of  his  art.  Two  or  three 
vivid  descriptions  and  a  few  happy  single  lines  that  iso- 
late natural  phenomena,  prove  how  far  he  had  left  behind 
him  the  aimless  looseness  of  the  Poems  of  Two  Brothers^ 
but  do  not  prophesy  the  distinctive  power  which  Tenny- 
son had  afterwards  over  Nature.  The  one  charm  of  the 
poem  is  its  youthfulness.  The  lavishness,  the  want  of 
temperance,  the  inability  to  stop  when  enough  has  been 
said,  the  welling-over  of  words,  the  boyishness  of  senti- 
ment, the  playing  at  sorrow — while  they  prove  that 
Tennyson  was  right  in  withdrawing  the  poem  from  pub- 
lication— nevertheless  give  us  pleasure,  the  pleasure  of 
touching  youth. 

Next  year  he  wrote  Timbuctoo.  It  is  not  at  all  like 
a  prize  poem,  and  to  be  original  in  a  prize  poem  was 
so  audacious  that  it  is  a  clear  proof  that  Tennyson  had 
become  conscious  of  his  proper  power.  He  intimated 
no  more.  Some  lines  in  it  are  fine,  but  its  main  interest 
is  that  his  conception  of  the  subject  proves  that  he  had 
now  seen  that  Fable  was  a  great  storehouse  of  poetic 
material.  He  builds  the  Timbuctoo  of  fable  ;  a  vision 
like  that  of  El  Dorado.  He  weaves  it  through  and 
through  with   spiritual   thought.     The    excitement    and 


The   Poems  of   1830  59 

the  method  are  the  same  as  those  he  felt  and  used  when 
he  began  to  take  up  the  legend  of  Arthur.  Neither  of  these 
poems,  however,  had  anything  to  do  with  English  life,  or 
was  influenced  by  the  movements  of  the  time.  Nor  did 
the  poet  appeal  in  them  to  the  public.  That  step  was 
made  by  the  volume  of  1830,  and  of  what  kind  it  was, 
and  moved  by  what  impulses,  is  now  the  matter  in  hand. 
I  have  maintained  that  when  Keats  died  there  was  no 
national  excitement  in  England,  no  emotional  movement 
towards  either  a  social  or  political  betterment  of  life,  no 
care  for  ideas  such  as  will  make  a  poet  feel  the  thrill  of 
humanity  in  the  present.  Without  that,  he  may  write, 
like  Keats,  for  a  time  about  the  past,  but  he  will  not 
produce  a  new  poetic  world.  Well,  this  excitement  of 
the  nation  was  supplied  to  Tennyson  and  to  Browning. 
The  reform  movement  had  now  begun  and  was  coming 
to  its  height.  A  new  religious  movement  also  began, 
and  had  taken  two  forms  before  three  years  passed  by  ; 
one  towards  a  greater  freedom  of  religious  thought,  and 
another  towards  a  vitalising  of  Church  doctrine  and 
ritual.  Both  contained  a  greater  intensity  of  self-sacri- 
fice than  had  been  known  for  years,  and  a  greater 
development  of  practical  work  for  the  poor  and  the 
sorrowful.  Both  were  an  extension  of  the  love  of  man, 
and  carried  with  them  an  emotion  which  ran  rapidly 
through  England.  Along  with  these  two  opposite  ten- 
dencies of  religious  thought  there  was,  of  course,  and 
owing  to  their  clashing,  an  awakening  of  spiritual  doubt, 
questioning   and    trouble    which  made    a    host    of  men 


6o  Tennyson 

interested  in  or  tormented  by  religion.  Traces  of  this 
are  everywhere  found  in  Tennyson.  "  What  am  I  ? 
Whence  have  I  come  ?  Whither  am  I  going  ?  What 
authority  have  I  for  any  faith  ?  What  has  God  to  do 
with  me,  or  I  with  God  ?  What  are  my  duties  to  man, 
and  what  is  their  foundation  ? "  These  were  the  kind 
of  questions  which  stirred  in  England,  like  leaven  in 
meal.  Excitement  then  in  politics,  in  social  ques- 
tions, in  religious  questions,  was  rife  in  this  country 
when  Tennyson  and  Browning  began  to  write.  Their 
youth  was  stirred  by  a  series  of  national  impulses.  This 
was  the  atmosphere  in  which  they  wrote  their  first  poems  ; 
and  their  after-poems  were  filled  with  it.  Thus  first 
poetry  again  began,  like  Pygmalion's  marble,  to  move  and 
speak,  stepped  down  from  its  pedestal  and  took  its  share 
in  the  life  of  men  and  women.  The  blood  grew  warm 
and  quick  within  its  veins. 

And  now  the  question  is  :  Of  what  kind  will  the  first 
poems  be — or,  rather,  of  what  kind  were  Tennyson's — 
under  these  conditions  ?  They  will  not  be  directly 
written  on  the  special  national  excitements.  The  poet 
is  kindled  by  these  excitements,  but  he  does  not  write 
on  them.  The  stirring  in  his  heart  which  he  receives 
from  the  nation  he  applies  to  his  own  subjects,  those 
which  are  personal  to  him.  The  primary  emotion  is 
national,  the  secondary  emotions  are  personal,  but  it  is 
on  the  secondary  that  he  writes.  Even  when  he  makes  a 
poem  upon  that  which  was  affecting  all  thoughtful  men  in 
the  nation — on  the  religious  problem — the   poem  is  not 


The   Poems  of   18^0  61 


written  to  express  the  national  feeling,  but  to  express 
his  own.  And  this  is  the  case  in  that  quasi-religious 
poem  in  the  volume  of  1830,  which  Tennyson  calls  the 
Confessions  of  a  Sensitive  Afind,  and  which  ends 

O  weary  life  !  O  weary  death  ! 
O  spirit  and  heart  made  desolate  ! 
O  damned  vacillating  state  ! 

Keats  could  not,  for  one  moment,  have  got  into  the 
condition  in  which  this  conclusion  and  the  poem  which 
precedes  it  were  possible.  When  Tennyson  in  1830 
wrote  his  sonnet  to  J.  M.  K.,  in  excitement  about  the 
work  this  friend  of  his  was  to  do  as  a  preacher  among 
mankind  ;  when  he  said  that  his  friend  would  be  a 
"  soldier-priest,  no  sabbath  drawler  of  old  saws,"  but 
spurred  at  heart  with  fieriest  energy  to  embattell  and  to 
wall  about  his  cause 

With  ironed-worded  proof,  hating  to  hark 

The  humming  of  the  drowsy  pulpit-drone 

Half  God's  good  sabbath,  while  the  worn-out  clerk 

Brow-beats  his  desk  below, 

he  was  moved  by  the  emotion  of  the  religious  revival 
A'hich  had  begun  in  England.  Such  an  emotion  could 
not  have  been  felt  by  Keats.  Had  Keats,  indeed,  lived 
longer  it  would  have  been  different,  for  he  began  before 
he  died  to  step  out  of  his  isolation  in  beauty  and  to  wish 
to  be  a  soldier  of  humanity  ;  and  he  would  have  been 
profoundly  moved  by  the  new  impulses  in  English  life. 


62  Tennyson 

Nor  would  it  have  been  possible  for  Keats,  in  his  time, 
to  write  the  English  War  Songs,  or  the  Natiotial  Song  at 
the  end  of  the  volume  of  1830,  which  are  filled  with 
a  young  man's  patriotic  pride,  and  with  a  contempt  of 
the  French  people.  They  are  not  fine  things,  but  they 
illustrate  my  contention — that  the  poets  had  again  taken 
interest  in  the  present  ;  that  the  nation,  being  new-born 
into  fresh  emotion,  was  making  a  new  ground  for  poetry. 
That  is  one  thing  to  say.  Another  is  that  the  poet 
will  not  altogether  get  rid  of  the  condition  of  things  in 
which  he  has  lived  since  he  was  a  boy.  He  will  write  a 
number  of  poems  in  his  first  books  which  will  be  of  the 
same  class  as  those  written  by  the  men  and  women  of 
the  exhausted  time,  pretty,  graceful,  powerless  poems, 
without  any  forward  outlook.  And  of  these  a  good  deal 
of  this  first  volume  of  Tennyson's  is  made  up.  The  first 
poem,  entitled  Claribel,  is  of  this  quality.  So  are  most 
of  the  poems  addressed  to  various  imagined  women — 
such  as  Lilian,  Madeline,  Adeline.  So  also  are  the  Songs, 
which  do  not  even  vaguely  prophesy  the  excellence  Ten- 
nyson afterwards  reached  in  this  kind  of  poetry.  It  is 
true,  the  refined  choice  of  words  in  these  poems,  their 
over-wrought  phrasing,  are  better  than  the  conventional 
grace  and  slippered  wording  of  the  contemporary  verse  ; 
but  they  are  still  of  that  mould  into  which  Mrs.  Hemans 
and  the  rest  cast  their  poetry.  The  poet,  even  though 
he  is  to  become  a  leader  of  fresh  song,  is  then  like  one  of 
those  figures  we  see  in  the  mediaeval  pictures  of  the 
Resurrection  at  the  Last  Judgment,  half  risen  from  the 


The   Poems  of  1830  63 

earth,  their  heads  and  arms  uplifted  to  the  new  light  of 
life,  their  legs  still  clasped  by  the  encumbering  earth. 

This  was  exactly  the  case  with  Tennyson.  He  is 
partly  sunk  in  the  old  clay,  but  he  is  partly  risen.  There 
are  poems  in  this  book  of  1830  in  which  the  fresh  utter- 
ance of  a  new  Maker  of  song  is  ringing  clear,  in  which 
he  has  got  free  altogether  of  the  past.  And  one  of  the 
earliest  things  he  wrote  ("  written  very  early  in  life  "  is 
his  own  addition  to  the  title)  is  one  of  these  prophetic 
things.  This  is  the  Ode  to  Memory.  We  hear  in  it  faint 
echoes  of  Coleridge,  or  of  Milton  ;  but  we  also  hear  a 
clear,  original,  and  dominant  note  of  his  own,  belonging 
to  none  ;  self-felt,  self-invented  ;  thought  and  emotion 
unknown  before  ;  music  and  phrasing  new.  No  wonder, 
having  done  this  as  a  boy,  he  felt  himself  a  man  apart, 
with  the  laurel  of  Apollo  within  his  reach.  When  we 
hear  a  verse  like  this  : 


Listening  the  lordly  music  flowing  from 
The  illimitable  years,* 


we  know  that  he  who  wrote  it  has  begun  work  which  has 
the  power  to  continue. 

And  when  we  read  this  description  of  a  natural  land- 
scape, we  know  that  we  are  listening  to  one  who  will 
reveal  to  us  Nature  under  a  new  light,  and  new  worlds 
of  Nature.     He  is  still  speaking  to  Memory : 

*  This  is  also  used  in  Timbuctoo. 


64  Tennyson 

Thou  wert  not  nursed  by  tlie  waterfall 

Wliich  ever  sounds  and  shines 
A  pillar  of  white  light  upon  the  wall 

Of  purple  cliffs,  aloof  descried  : 

Come  from  the  woods  that  belt  the  gray  hillside, 
The  seven  elms,  the  poplars  four, 
That  stand  beside  my  father's  door, 
And  chiefly  from  the  brook  that  loves 
To  purl  o'er  matted  cress  and  ribbed  sand, 
Or  dimple  in  the  dark  of  rushy  coves. 
Drawing  into  his  narrow  earthen  urn, 

In  every  elbow  and  turn, 
The  filter'd  tribute  of  the  rough  woodland, 

O  !  hith:r  lead  thy  feet  ! 
Pour  round  mine  ears  the  livelong  bleat 
Of  the  thick  fleeced  sheep  from  wattled  folds. 

Upon  the  ridged  wolds. 

The  metrical  movement  is  untrained,  there  is  not 
sufficient  rejection  of  the  superfluous  ;  but  there  is  the 
original  thing.  The  sight  of  Nature  and  its  expression 
owe  something  to  Wordsworth  and  Keats.  But  beyond 
the  echoes  there  is  the  sounding  of  a  new  horn  on 
Apollo's  hill.  Nor  does  this  stand  alone.  There  are  at 
least  twelve  poems  in  this  first  book  which  are  like  the 
gates  into  a  fresh  world,  and  better  work  at  every  point 
than  this  Ode  to  3femo?y.  Among  these  are  Mariana,  Rec- 
ollections of  the  Arabian  Nights,  The  Poet,  The  Dying 
Swan,  Love  a?id  Death^  Oriana,  The  Sleeping  Beauty,  The 
Sea  Fairies. 

In  these  Tennyson's  picture-poetry  begins  in  a  num- 
ber of  elaborate  studies  of  Nature,  with  one  figure  in 
them  to  give  them  human  interest  ;    and  these  studies 


The   Poems  of   1830  65 

are  of  two  kinds.  Some  are  carried  through  a  poem  of 
many  verses,  like  Mariana,  where  the  one  landscape  is 
described  at  various  times  of  day  and  night,  where  birds 
and  animals  correspondent  to  the  emotion  are  intro- 
duced, and  where  all  are  led  up  to  one  lonely  figure. 
Others  are  in  short  single  verses — a  whole  landscape  set 
in  the  frame  of  a  quatrain — like  those  composed  in  1833 
for  The  Palace  of  Art.  This  was,  on  both  its  sides,  a 
new  method.  The  previous  poets  had  not  invented  it. 
Here  is  a  passage  from  Mariana  of  pure  landscape.  I 
quote  from  the  volume  of  1830  : 

About  a  stone-cast  from  the  wall, 

A  sluice  with  blacken'd  waters  slept, 
And  o'er  it  many,  round  and  small, 

The  cluster'd  marish-mosses  crept. 
Hard  by  a  poplar  shook  alway. 

All  silver-green  with  gnarled  bark  ; 

For  leagues  no  other  tree  did  dark 
The  level  waste,  the  rounding  gray. 

The  last  two  lines  illustrate  his  homelike  love  for  a 
land  of  wide  horizons  and  low  skies,  fringed  with  hum- 
ble hills,  such  as  he  saw  continually  in  the  fen  country  ; 
such  as  he  pencils  out  in  one  rapid  sketch  in  Oriana, 
where  in  only  two  lines  we  see  and  hear  the  wintry  world 
with  equal  vividness — 

When  the  long  dun  wolds  are  ribb'd  with  snow, 
And  loud  the  Norland  whirlwinds  blow. 

There  is  already  the  full-mouthed  vowel-music  of  Ten- 
nyson ;  one  of  the  characteristics  of  his  careful  art  in 


66  Tennyson 

words,  of  which  no  one  before,  except  Milton,  was  so 
skilled,  so  conscious,  or  so  continuous  a  master.  A 
whole  essay  might  be  written  on  this  part  of  his  technic 
art  ;  and  it  is  worth  a  reader's  while,  for  once  at  least,  to 
collect  together  these  great  vowel-passages  from  his 
poems. 

The  Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights  is  another  of 
these  landscape  poems.  Every  verse  is  a  picture  of  a 
new  reach  of  the  river  Tigris  ;  the  sound  of  every  word 
is  studied  in  them,  so  that  the  words  in  their  varied 
sound  should  do  the  same  office  for  the  poetry  that  the 
various  tones  of  colour  do  for  a  painting.  And  to  ac- 
complish this  the  better,  he  now  invented,  but  far  too 
much  and  with  a  luxuriance  which  he  afterwards  pruned 
away,  a  number  of  double  adjectives,  chosen  as  much 
for  their  sound  as  for  their  images.  All  the  poems 
about  women  are  filled  with  these — sudden-curved, 
golden-netted,  forward-flowing,  silver-chiming,  fountain- 
fragrant,  shadow-chequered,  hollow-vaulted,  sable-sheeny 
— and  very  many  more  :  a  dangerous  trick  to  gain,  and 
one  from  which  it  is  difficult  to  escape.  Tennyson  loved 
these  double-shotted  words,  but  he  had  power  enough 
afterwards  to  bring  their  use  into  moderation. 

There  is  another  poem,  The  Sea  Fairies^  not  much  in 
itself,  but  also  prophetic  of  a  new  world  in  poetry. 
The  first  three  lines  in  the  song  of  the  Sirens  is  the  first 
true  note  of  the  singing  quality,  both  in  metre  and  in 
unity  of  theme,  which  afterwards  made  the  songs  of 
Tennyson  so   distinguished.      The  other  songs    in   this 


# 


The   Poems  of   1830  (i^ 

book  might  have  been  written  by  half  a  dozen  other 
men — they  belong  to  the  merely  graceful — but  this  is  his 
own,  and  its  quality  is  altogether  of  a  new  kind.  It 
begins  : 


Whither  away,  whither  away,  whither  away  ?     Fly  no  more  : 
Whither  away  with  the  swinging  sail  ?   whither  away  with  the  oar  ? 
Whither  away  from  the  high  green  field  and  the  happy  blossoming 
shore  ? 


This  is  the  easy  movement  of  a  raetrist's  wing  in  an 
early  flight,  singing  all  the  time.  I  say  an  early  flight, 
for  his  metrical  movement,  as  most  of  the  poems  in  this 
book  declare,  was  at  this  time  broken,  halting,  and  un- 
musical. Coleridge  said,  when  he  read  these  poems, 
that  Tennyson  had  "  begun  to  write  verses  without  very 
well  understanding  what  metre  is  "  ;  and  indeed  he  ar- 
rived at  the  excellence  he  did  attain  in  metre  more  by 
study  than  by  natural  gift.  But  the  capability  of  flne 
artistic  song  is  as  clearly  shadowed  forth  in  The  Sea 
Fairies^  as  the  full  sunlight  is  by  the  colours  of  the 
dawn.  What  it  was  to  become,  after  some  years  of 
training,  any  one  may  read  in  the  song  in  The  Lotos- 
Eaters^  of  which  this  poem  is,  as  it  were,  the  first  sketch. 

Moreover,  there  is  another  characteristic  of  Tenny- 
son's future  poetry  in  The  Sea  Fairies.  It  is  the  first  of 
the  small  classical  studies  in  which  he  excelled,  and  it  is 
built  on  the  same  foundation  as  the  rest  of  them.  When 
he  takes  a  classical  subject  he  builds  it  up  with  one 
underlying  thought  which,  running  through  the  whole  of 


68  Tennyson 

the  poem,  gives  it  unity.  He  chooses  a  simple  thought, 
common  to  all  mankind  ;  felt  by  the  ancients,  but  to 
which  he  gives  continual  touches  and  variations  which 
grow  out  of  modern  life,  and  out  of  his  own  soul.  This 
is  the  case  with  Ulysses,  CEnone,  Tithomis,  and  the  rest. 
But  the  unity  and  simplicity  of  the  thought,  its  mingled 
ancient  and  modern  air,  and  its  careful  inweaving  into 
the  whole  body  of  the  story,  make  these  classical  things 
of  his  unique.  No  one  has  ever  done  them  in  the  same 
fashion,  and  the  fashion  is  extraordinarily  interesting. 

In  The  Sea  Fairies  the  thought  is  the  weariness  of  the 
ceaseless  labour  of  the  world.  "  Why  toil  so  much  for 
so  little  ?  Take  the  joy  of  rest  and  love.  Sleep,  before 
the  great  sleep."  We  shall  see  how  this  excessively 
simple  thought  is  splendidly  wrought  out  in  The  Lotos- 
Eaters.  It  is  enough  now  to  say  that  this  is  the  first  of 
these  classical  poems,  and,  so  far  as  method  is  con- 
cerned, it  is  similar  to  them  all.  This,  then,  is  also  a 
new  thing. 

Once  more,  on  this  poem,  we  have  in  it  and  The 
Mystic  the  first  clear  sound  of  the  blank  verse  of  Tenny- 
son.    These  lines  from  The  Mystic  belong  to  him  : 

He,  often  lying  broad  awake,  and  yet 
Remaining  in  the  body,  and  apart 
In  intellect  and  power  and  will,  hath  heard 
Time  flowing  in  the  middle  of  the  night. 
And  all  things  creeping  to  a  day  of  doom. 

Still  more  prophetic  of  a  new  blank  verse  are  the  lines 
at  the  beginning  of  The  Sea  Fairies  : 


The   Poems  of   1830  69 

Slow  sail'd  the  weary  mariners  and  saw. 

Between  the  green  brink  and  the  running  foam, 

White  limbs  unrobed  in  a  crystal  air. 

Sweet  faces,  rounded  arms,  and  bosoms  prest 

To  little  harps  of  gold  ;  and,  while  they  mused, 

Whispering  to  each  other  half  in  fear. 

Shrill  music  reach'd  them  on  the  middle  sea. 

No  one,  with  an  ear,  can  mistake  the  novelty  of  the 
verse.  It  is  plainly  done  by  one  who  had  read  Milton, 
but  it  is  not  Milton's  way  ;  it  is  Tennyson's  own  ;  and 
it  is  charming  to  hear  the  first  note  of  a  music  which  has 
delighted  us  so  long  in  two  lines  like  these  : 

Slow  sailed  the  weary  mariners,  and  saw 
Between  the  green  brink  and  the  running  foam. 

These,  then,  are  the  new  things  in  the  poems  of  1830. 
It  remains  to  speak  of  his  conception  of  what  a  poet 
was,  and  of  himself  as  poet. 

I  have  said  that  Tennyson  was  conscious  all  his  life 
of  being  set  apart  as  a  prophet,  and  of  the  duties  which 
he  owed  to  humanity.  His  life,  in  his  own  mind,  was 
weighted  with  a  sense  of  these  duties.  He  would  have 
quoted  for  himself  that  noble  passage  in  which  Milton 
pictures  himself  and  realises  what  sort  of  character  the 
lofty  poet  must  possess.  He  would  have  felt  with  that 
equally  noble  passage  in  The  Prelude,  where  Wordsworth 
describes  himself  as  consecrated  to  his  work  by  Nature 
and  by  God.  And  it  marks  that  change  in  the  temper 
of  England  of  which  I  wrote  at  the  beginning,  that 
Tennyson  could  not  conceive,  like  Keats,  of  his  work  as 
done  for  beauty's  sake  alone,  but  also  for  the  sake  of 


70  Tennyson 

humankind.  The  new  earnestness  and  excitement  of 
the  world  compelled  him  to  conceive  of  his  work  with 
the  same  intensity  as  Wordsworth  when,  writing  under 
the  enrapturing  and  fresh  enthusiasm  of  humanity  and 
buoyant  with  youthful  vigour,  he  came  at  first  to  Gras- 
mere.  Wordsworth  paints  his  soul,  its  outlook  and  its 
energy,  in  undying  lines  at  the  end  of  The  Recluse ;  and 
the  comparison  of  these  (which  I  commend  to  my  read- 
ers) wdth  Tennyson's  verses  on  The  Poet  is  full  of  de- 
lightful interest. 

In  that  poem,  Tennyson  lays  down,  and  out  of  his 
ow'n  inward  experience,  what  he  conceived  himself  to 
be,  and  how  he  conceived  his  work ;  and  he  never 
abandoned,  betrayed,  or  enfeebled  his  conception.  It 
is  a  remarkable  utterance  for  so  young  a  man,  weighty 
with  that  steadiness  of  temper  which,  if  it  diminished 
spontaneity  in  his  art,  yet  gave  it  a  lasting  power. 

The  poet  in  a  golden  clime  was  born, 

With  golden  stars  above  ; 
Dower'd  with  the  hate  of  hate,  the  scorn  of  scorn, 

The  love  of  love. 

That  is  the  beginning,  and  the  first  needs  of  the  poet's 
nature  could  scarcely  be  better  expressed.  Then  he 
speaks  of  the  clear  insight  into  God  and  man  which  is 
the  best  gift  of  the  poet. 

He  saw  thro'  life  and  death,  thro*  good  and  ill. 

He  saw  thro'  his  own  soul. 
The  marvel  of  the  everlasting  will, 

An  open  scroll, 

Before  him  lay. 


The   Poems  of   1830  71 

Then  his  thoughts,  blown  like  arrow-seeds  over  the 
whole  world  with  melodies  and  light,  take  root,  and  be- 
come flowers  in  the  hearts  of  men,  till  high  desires  are 
born,  and  truth  is  multiplied  on  truth, 

And  thro'  the  wreaths  of  floating  dark  upcurled. 
Rare  sunrise  flow'd. 

And  in  that  sunrise.  Freedom  clothed  in  wisdom  came 
upon  Man,  and  shook  his  spirit,  and  ruined  anarchies 
and  oppressions.  This  was  Tennyson's  youthful  con- 
ception of  his  work,  and  we  should  never  forget  it  when 
we  read  his  poetry,  though  we  are  tempted  sometimes  to 
think  that  he  forgot  this  last  part  of  it  himself.  I  quote 
the  final  verses,  and  from  the  book  of  1830.  Their  note 
is  new.  Their  power,  in  contrast  with  the  light  verse 
that  was  contemporary  with  them,  is  the  revelation  of  a 
poetic  resurrection  : 

And  Freedom  rear'd  in  that  august  sunrise 

Her  beautiful,  bold  brow, 
When  rites  and  forms  before  his  burning  eyes 

Melted  like  snow. 

There  was  no  blood  upon  her  maiden  robes 

Sunn'd  by  those  orient  skies ; 
But  round  about  the  circles  of  the  globes 

Of  her  keen  eyes 

*  And  in  the  bordure  of  her  robe  was  writ 
Wisdom — a  name  to  shake 
Hoar  anarchies,  as  with  a  thunder-fit. 
And  when  she  spake, 

*  Recast  in  1842. 

And  in  her  raiment's  hem  was  traced  in  flame 

Wisdom,  a  name  to  shake 
All  evil  dreams  of  power — a  sacred  name. 


72 


Tennyson 


Her  words  did  gather  thunder  as  they  ran, 
And  as  the  lightning  to  the  thunder 

Which  follows  it,  riving  the  spirit  of  man. 
Making  earth  wonder, 

So  was  their  meaning  to  her  words.     No  sword 

Of  ■ivrath  her  right  arm  hurl'd, 
But  one  poor  poet's  scroll,  and  with  his  word 

She  shook  the  world. 


CHAPTER  II 
THE  POEMS  OF   1 833 

THREE  years  after  the  volume  of  1830,  Tennyson 
published  the  little  book  of  1833,  containing  thirty 
new  poems.  In  this  second  volume  he  wrought  still 
further  at  the  new  veins  he  had  struck,  and  turned  their 
ore  into  finer  shapes.  But  he  not  only  developed  work 
he  had  already  begun  ;  he  found  fresh  and  different 
veins  of  poetry,  opened  these  also,  and  made  out  of  their 
gold  new  creations  full  of  the  spirit  of  youth  hastening 
to  a  greater  excellence.  Evolution  then  of  the  subjects 
discovered  in  1830 — creation  of  new  subjects  in  1833 — 
these  are  the  matter  of  this  chapter. 

But  first,  it  is  well  to  mark  how  the  artist,  as  artist, 
grows.  He  cannot  cease  inventing  ;  new  things,  new 
forms  spring  up  under  his  hand  ;  ever  uncontent  be- 
cause the  unattainable  of  Beauty  lures  him  on.  "  If 
thou  givest  me,"  cries  Beauty  in  his  heart,  "  a  thousand 
shapes,  there  are  yet  a  million  more  which  thou  mayest 
invent  for  me,  and  yet  I  shall  not  be  exhausted."  He 
who  feels  that  allurement  and  hears  that  cry  has  the  art- 

73 


74  Tennyson 

ist's  temper  ;  he  who  can  embody  what  he  feels  and 
hears,  in  ever  varying  forms,  till  old  age  touch  him  with 
inability,  is  the  artist.  He  moves  "  from  well  to  better, 
daily  self-surpast,"  till  he  has  no  more  power.  We  know 
when  his  power  is  lessening,  for  then  he  begins  to  repeat 
himself.  We  know  that  it  still  exists,  however  feebly, 
when,  in  the  midst  of  repetitions,  new  things  now  and 
then  appear. 

And  it  is  one  of  the  happy  things  in  Tennyson's 
career,  that  even  till  he  was  past  eighty  years  of  age, 
this  creativeness — that  is,  this  power  of  being  inflamed 
with  the  love  of  Beauty  and  animated  by  her  into  crea- 
tion— did  not  altogether  die.  In  the  very  last  volume 
he  published  there  appeared  a  poem  called  The  Gleam, 
which,  if  it  was  written  shortly  before  the  book  was  is- 
sued, was  a  new  and  beautiful  blossom  on  his  ancient 
tree.  Those  who,  walking  in  an  English  park,  have 
come  upon  an  oak,  broken  off  short  by  age  or  storm  and 
hollow  within,  but  whose  rugged  gnarls  send  forth  leaves 
as  delicate  as  those  of  its  childhood,  must  have  often 
thought,  "  There  is  the  image  of  the  great  artist  in  his 
old  age,  of  the  great  musician,  the  great  painter,  the 
great  poet "  ;  and  though  Tennyson  does  not  stand 
among  the  very  mightiest,  yet  he  had  this  singular  and 
noble  power  of  fresh  creation  in  old  age. 

We  are  sure  to  find  this  creativeness  in  his  youth.  It 
appeared,  as  we  have  seen,  in  1830,  and  I  have  discussed 
some  forms  of  it  in  the  previous  chapter.  Two  forms  of 
it,  however,  I  omitted — one,  the  drawing  of  "  charac- 


The   Poems  of   1833  75 

ters  "  ;  the  other,  the  drawing  of  Nature.  Both  of  these 
were  more  fully  worked  out  in  the  volume  of  1833. 
Both  are  new  in  manner,  and  interesting  beyond  them- 
selves. 

The  types  of  character  were  drawn,  each  apart,  like 
solitary  statues.  As  a  young  man,  he  chose  women  on 
whom  to  try  his  prentice  hand,  and  we  have  a  series  of 
these  pictures,  with  fanciful  names  written  underneath 
them.  They  are  lifeless  as  women,  lay  figures  with 
elaborate  dresses  ;  word-painted,  nothing  but  words. 
There  are  no  surprises  in  these  characters,  nothing  inex- 
plicable, nothing  unexpected,  nothing  veiled,  no  pro- 
found simplicity,  nothing  which  recalls  a  woman.  They 
are,  above  all,  logically  worked  out ;  one  verse  opens 
into  another  in  an  intellectual  order.  We  can  predict 
what  is  coming — as  if  their  subjects  moved  in  accord- 
ance to  law.  It  was  like  a  young  man  to  try  this,  but  it 
was  a  pity  he  did  not  prefer  to  draw  his  college  com- 
panions, for  the  one  man's  character  that  he  does  out- 
line is  a  fairly-painted  type.     Here  are  two  verses  of  it . 

Most  delicately  hour  by  hour 
He  canvass'd  human  mysteries  ; 
And  trod  on  silk,  as  if  the  winds 
Blew  his  own  praises  in  his  eyes, 
And  stood  aloof  from  other  minds 
In  impotence  of  fancied  power. 

With  lips  depress'd  as  he  were  meek. 
Himself  unto  himself  he  sold  ; 
Upon  himself  himself  did  feed  : 
Quiet,  dispassionate  and  cold, 


76  Tennyson 

And  other  than  liis  form  of  creed, 
With  chisell'd  features  clear  and  sleek. 

But  even  that  is  more  like  an  exercise  in  the  descrip- 
tion of  a  type  than  like  the  picture  of  a  living  man. 
Character  is  shown  by  clashing  with  character.  It  may 
"  form  itself  in  silence,"  but  it  is  ignorant  of  itself  till  it 
can  speak  to  others  and  answer  their  speech.  Hence 
the  Maker,  who  is  bound  to  paint  men  and  women, 
almost  always  paints  them  in  movement  with  or  against 
one  another.  Tennyson  did  that  fairly  afterwards,  but 
never  superbly.  The  effort  to  make  a  type  was  always 
too  much  with  him.  The  men  and  women  in  the  Idylls 
of  the  King  want  life.  The  personal  edges  and  angles 
have  been  worn  away  in  order  to  establish  the  type. 
Enid,  Tristram,  Vivien,  Arthur,  even  Lancelot  who  is 
the  most  living,  are  often  like  those  photographs  which 
are  made  by  photographing  the  faces  of  a  series  of 
politicians  or  philosophers  or  artists  one  on  the  top  of 
another.  We  get  the  general  type — or  they  say  we  get 
it — but  we  do  not  get  a  man.  The  men  and  women  who 
are  most  actual  in  Tennyson's  poetry  are  those  whom 
he  printed  out  of  every-day  life,  and  in  the  sphere  of 
the  common  affections  and  troubles  of  mankind — in 
stories  like  Enoch  Arde?i,  in  country  idylls  like  The 
Gardener* s  Daughter^  Dora,  The  Brook  j  in  the  Lincoln- 
shire dialect  poems,  which  bring  before  us  the  most 
living  persons  in  his  books. 

Nevertheless,  the  attempt  Tennyson  made  at  this  time 
to  draw  separate  characters  is  in  harmony  with  the  age 


The   Poems  of   1833  ^"j 

in  which  he  began  to  write.  Character-making  was 
once  a  favourite  species  of  poetry,  but  it  had  not  been 
done  well  since  the  time  of  Pope.  None  of  the  greater 
poets  from  Wordsworth  to  Keats  took  up  this  special 
form  of  art.  But  Tennyson,  and  with  greater  power 
Browning,  deliberately  insulated  and  painted  a  number 
of  characters,  and  of  generalised  types  of  character,  as 
if  a  certain  driving  force  from  without,  a  tendency  of 
popular  thought,  urged  them  to  make  much  of  the  indi- 
vidual, as  if  society  had  concluded  that  it  was  to  find  its 
betterment  in  the  support  of  strong  individualities. 
And  indeed  this  was  the  case  in  England  in  1833.  As 
great  as  the  tendency  is  at  present  to  collectivism,  so 
great  was  the  tendency  then  to  individualism.  It  grew 
steadily  in  politics,  even  in  art  and  religion,  for  thirty 
years,  and  then  it  began  to  abate.  Large  crowds  of  men 
laid  all  their  lives  in  the  hands  of  great  leaders  of 
thought ;  and  thus,  while  they  maintained  the  necessity 
for  strong  individualities,  lessened  individualism  by 
collecting  in  mass  under  the  banner  of  one  man  ;  so 
curiously  and  so  certainly  do  extremes  cut  their  own 
throats.  The  individual,  the  powerful  character,  is 
everything,  said  Carlyle,  and  said  it  for  more  than  forty 
years.  This  was  partly  a  protest  against  the  past  dul- 
ness  of  society,  it  was  still  more  the  protest  of  the  fear 
of  the  cultivated  man  that  in  the  coming  democracy  all 
men  would  be  levelled  and  a  dull  monotony  rule  su- 
preme. Every  valley,  they  cried,  will  be  exalted  and 
every  mountain  and  hill  brought  low  ;  there  will  be  no 


78  Tennyson 

varied  scenery  in  humanity.     We  hear  that  dread  eX' 
pressed  by  Tennyson  in  Locksley  Hall: 

Knowledge  comes,  but  wisdom  lingers,  and  I  linger  on  the  shore 
And  the  individual  withers,  and  the  world  is  more  and  more. 

The  verses  which  follow,  the  hero's  desire  to  break 
all  links  of  habit,  to  escape  to  summer  isles,  "  where  the 
passions,  cramped  no  longer,  shall  have  scope  and 
breathing  space "  ;  where  men  shall  be  free  to  make 
themselves,  continue  the  same  thought.  He  had  then  in 
1842,  when  Locksley  Hall  was  published,  realised  fully 
the  desire  for  individualism  which  was  then  rife  in  Eng- 
land. It  was  this  force  which  pressed  him  in  1830  and 
1833  into  the  writing  of  characters. 

Secondly,  I  have  drawn  attention  to  the  new  way  of 
painting  Nature  which  Tennyson  developed,  and  to  the 
new  world  of  Nature  to  which  he  introduced  us.  He 
composed  his  Nature  into  pictures,  a  thing  not  done  by 
Byron,  Shelley,  or  Keats,  or  at  least  not  so  deliberately, 
not  so  consciously.  This  picture-composing  of  Nature 
is  carried  to  much  greater  excellence  in  the  volume  of 
1833.  I  might  contrast  Mariana  in  the  South,  a  poem 
of  1833,  with  Mariana  of  1830,  but  it  would  not  prove 
my  point — that  his  power  of  nature-painting  had  in- 
creased. It  suggests,  however,  another  point  with  regard 
to  Tennyson's  natural  description.  Mariana  in  the 
South  is  not  so  good  as  its  predecessor  ;  and  I  believe 
that  the  reason  of  its  comparative  failure  is  that  the 
scene  is  laid  in  the  South,  and  Tennyson  was  so  English, 


The   Poems  of  1833  79 

and  so  much  the  child  of  long  habit,  that  when  he  got 
outside  of  this  country,  even  outside  of  the  landscape 
which  surrounded  him  year  after  year,  he  did  not  choose 
so  happily  as  in  England  the  right  thing  to  say  in  order 
to  give  the  sentiment  of  the  landscape.  This  is,  how- 
ever, subject  to  exception.  What  I  say  is  true  concern- 
ing his  foreign  landscapes,  whenever  he  is  working  direct 
from  Nature,  or  composing  out  of  things  he  has  seen. 
It  is  not  true  when  he  is  deliberately  inventing  his  land- 
scape out  of  his  own  head,  and  with  reference  to  his 
subject — as  he  is  in  CEnone  or  The  Lotos- Eaters.  There 
he  paints  the  inward  vision  ;  and  he  does  it  with  noble 
clearness.  But  we  understand  that  the  landscape  is 
imagined,  that  it  has  never  been  seen. 

With  this  exception,  it  is  only  the  accustomed  land- 
scape of  his  own  land,  studied  from  the  life,  that  he  sees 
clearly  and  describes  well ;  and  this  belongs  to  his  char- 
acter as  well  as  to  his  art.  He  was  a  homelike  person, 
and  it  was  not  till  Nature  had  for  many  years  slowly 
"  crept  into  the  study  of  his  imagination  "  that  he  could 
paint  her  with  the  affectionate  finish  he  desired.  Rapid 
impressions  received  in  travel  he  could  not,  like  Byron 
or  Shelley,  record  with  excellence.  The  poem  called 
The  Daisy,  in  which  he  attempts  this  work,  is,  with  the 
exception  of  one  verse,  a  failure.  But  that  which  had 
endeared  itself  to  him  for  years,  which  amid  a  thousand 
varieties  of  aspect  had  unity  of  sentiment,  the  landscape 
of  Lincolnshire,  the  fens  and  the  meres  and  sea  ;  the 
landscape  of  Surrey,  Kent,  Hampshire,  and  the  Isle  of 


8o  Tennyson 

Wight — of  the  chalk  and  the  sandstone — this  he  did  to 
perfection.  In  The  Palace  o/Ari,ihe  landscapes  are  on 
the  tapestry,  and  of  course  are  themselves  pictures.  All 
the  more  then  they  illustrate  his  way  of  looking  at  Nature 
— his  turn  for  composing  her  like  a  painter.  Each 
landscape  is  done  in  four  lines,  and  with  the  exception 
of  two,  they  might  all  be  in  Lincolnshire.  I  quote  from 
the  poem  as  altered  in  1842  : 

One  seem'd  all  dark  and  red — a  tract  of  sand, 

And  some  one  pacing  there  alone, 
Who  paced  for  ever  in  a  glimmering  land. 

Lit  with  a  low  large  moon. 

The  second  is  not  Lincolnshire  : 

One  show'd  an  iron  coast  and  angry  waves. 

You  seem'd  to  hear  them  climb  and  fall. 
And  roar  rock-thwarted  under  bellowing  caves, 

Beneath  the  windy  wall. 

That  seems  to  be  a  piece  of  the  coast  of  Yorkshire, 
outside  of  his  own  country.  It  is  good,  but  if  he  had 
belonged  to  the  Yorkshire  coast,  and  loved  it  like  the 
glimmering  lands  of  Lincoln  with  the  low-hung  moon, 
the  second  line  would  have  been  better  done.  The  next 
is  full  Lincolnshire,  and  might  be  a  motto  for  the  art 
of  De  Wint : 

And  one,  a  full  fed  river  winding  slow 

By  herds  upon  an  endless  plain. 
The  ragged  rims  of  thunder  brooding  low, 

With  shadow-streaks  of  rain. 

The  next  is  from  the  South.  "  Hoary  in  the  wind  "  is 
the  vision  of  the  gray  underside  of  the  olive-leaf  tossed 


The   Poems  of   1833  ^^ 

upwards  over  a  whole  hillside  by  the  gust  into  the 
sunlight. 

And  one,  the  reapers  at  their  sultry  toil. 

In  front  they  bound  the  sheaves.     Behind 
Were  realms  of  upland,  prodigal  in  oil. 
And  hoary  to  the  wind. 

The  whole  is,  however,  not  clear ;  he  does  not  see  it  as 
vividly  as  the  rest,  and  there  is  little  sentiment  in  it. 

But  the  next — could  it  be  better  ?  And  how  drenched 
it  is  in  the  sentiment  of  England  ! 

And  one,  an  English  home — gray  twilight  pour'd 

On  dewy  pastures,  dewy  trees, 
Softer  than  sleep — all  things  in  order  stored, 

A  haunt  of  ancient  Peace. 

This  is  Tennyson  in  love  with  his  subject,  and  the 
quality  of  the  poetry  rises  with  his  love.  Moreover,  it 
is  delightful  to  see  him  stretch  out  his  hand  to  Virgil, 
who  was  as  fond  of  his  country  as  Tennyson  of  England 
— **  Softer  than  sleep." 

Again,  we  stand  on  the  long  shallow  sands  of  the 
sea-coast  near  his  early  home,  and  there  is  no  better, 
briefer,  yet  more  finished  picture  in  all  his  work  : 

A  still  salt  pool,  lock'd  in  with  bars  of  sand, 
Left  on  the  shore  ;  that  hears  all  night 

Their  plunging  seas  draw  backward  from  the  land 
Their  moon-led  waters  white. 

These  are  properly  pictures,  but  the  immense  improve- 
ment in  the  description  of  Nature  which  took  place  be- 
tween 1830  and  1833  is  more  fully  seen  in  poems  where 
Nature  and   human  affections  are  woven  together,  as  in 


82  Tennyson 

The  May  Queen,  and  better  still  in  The  Miller's  Daughter^ 
both  of  this  year.  The  girl's  cottage  is  on  the  hillside, 
aoove  the  valley  and  the  meadowy  stream.  The  land  is 
full  of  flowers  and  grass.  The  cowslip  and  the  crowfoot 
are  all  over  the  hill,  the  honeysuckle  is  round  the  porch, 
the  faint  sweet  cuckoo-flowers  grow  beside  the  meadow 
trenches  ;  "  And  the  wild  marsh-marigold  shines  like 
fire  in  swamps  and  hollows  gray."  Where  in  the  world 
can  we  place  this  except  in  England — half  in  Lincoln, 
half  in  Kent  ? 

Fond  as  he  was  of  the  common  flowers,  he  was  even 
fonder  of  the  birds.  The  red  cock  crows,  in  this  poem, 
from  the  farm  upon  the  hill  : 

The  building  rook  '11  caw  from  the  windy  tall  elm-tree, 

And  the  tufted  plover  pipe  along  the  fallow  lea, 

And  the  swallow  'ill  come  again  with  summer  o'er  the  wave. 

Every  line  is  a  picture  in  a  new  style  of  art,  something 
which  had  not  been  done  before  in  this  fashion  and 
finish  ;  no,  not  even  by  Wordsworth  whose  love  of  flowers 
and  birds  is  less  pictorial,  but  more  instinct  with  the 
life  of  the  thing  he  describes.  Nor  could  Wordsworth, 
who  is  the  mountain  poet,  have  made  us  feel  the  land- 
scape of  the  lower  English  lands  as  Tennyson  does — 
with  our  pity  for  the  dying  girl  Avoven  through  it  all — 
in  these  four  lines,  so  clear  and  fine  : 

When  the  flowers  come  again,  mother,  1:)eneath  the  waning  light, 
You  '11  never  see  me  more  in  the  long  gray  fields  at  night  ; 
When  from  the  dry  dark  wold  the  summer  airs  blow  cool, 
On  the  oat-grass  and  the  sword-grass,  and  the  bulrush  in  the  pool. 


The   Poems  of  1833  8 


J 


Still  more  of  England  and  of  the  scenery  of  the 
chalk-lands,  which  whosoever  loves,  loves  well,  is  all  the 
landscape  in  The  Miller  s  Daughter.  In  this  poem,  as 
in  the  last,  there  is  no  special  picture  made  of  the  land- 
scape, for  the  human  interest  is  first.  But  we  might, 
culling  from  verse  to  verse  our  indications,  paint  the 
whole  of  the  country-side  round  the  mill,  so  careful  is 
Tennyson  in  his  drawing,  so  deeply  has  the  scene  sunk 
into  his  imagination.  It  is  owing  to  this  full  digestion, 
in  contemplation,  of  the  landscape,  that  the  human  fig- 
ures— the  miller,  the  lover,  the  maiden — are  so  much 
felt,  as  we  read,  to  be  at  union  with  the  natural  world 
round  them,  even  to  be  partly  made  into  what  they  are  by 
dwelling  with  it  for  so  long.  Tennyson,  who  himself, 
with  regard  to  the  Nature  he  described,  was  in  part  a 
product  of  that  Nature,  knew  how  to  do  this  artistic 
thing,  and  it  gives  an  extraordinary  unity  to  a  great 
number  of  his  poems.  Had  he  not  absorbed  his  scenery 
in  this  fashion,  he  could  not  have  had  the  capacity,  not 
only  to  see  the  minuter  things,  as  the  colour  of  ash-buds 
in  March,  a  capacity  which  was  not  fully  developed  till 
ten  years  after  this  volume,  but  to  give,  in  a  line  or  two, 
the  very  image  of  the  whole  country  its  essential  marks  : 

The  white  chalk-quarry  from  the  hill 
Gleam'd  to  the  flying  moon  by  fits — 

On  the  chalk-hill  the  bearded  grass 
Is  dry  and  dewless.     Let  us  go. 

Night  and  day,  the  whole  country  lies  before  us.     This 


$4  Tennyson 

is  one  of  the  great  art-powers,  the  power  of  choosing 
out  of  a  multitude  of  impressions  that  single  thing 
which  will  awaken  all  the  rest  of  the  landscape,  with  its 
sentiment,  before  the  eyes.  It  is  partly  natural  gift, 
but  it  is  also  the  result  of  long  indrinking  of  the  special 
landscape,  and  years  of  the  special  landscape,  and 
years  of  inward  contemplation  of  it.  And  in  this  matter 
of  living  with  Nature  in  one  place  for  years,  and  out  of 
the  incessant  observation  of  love  of  actually  creating 
in  poetry  a  portion  of  England,  with  its  birds  and  flowers, 
its  skies,  woodland,  meadows,  and  streams,  and  so  vividly 
and  truly  that  every  touch  tells  ;  every  adjective,  the 
sound  of  the  words,  the  pauses  in  the  line,  enhancing 
the  life  of  the  whole  description — for  this  reproduction 
of  a  whole  land  and  of  the  final  impression  made  by  it 
after  many  years  upon  the  soul,  and  for  the  power  of 
making  us  feel  the  land  as  the  poet  felt  it — we  must 
get  back,  if  we  would  find  a  comparison,  to  Wordsworth. 
Wordsworth  did  for  the  Lake  country  what  Tennyson 
did  for  southern  England  and  the  Fenland.  But  Words- 
worth did  not  do  this  part  of  his  work  with  as  much 
specialised  power  as  Tennyson. 

This  is  the  first  thing  to  say  of  his  landscape.  The 
second  concerns  his  invented  landscape,  but  this  will 
be  more  fitly  treated  of  in  the  chapter  on  the  Classical 
poems. 

Meanwhile,  Tennyson  began  two  new  kinds  of  poetry 
in  this  book  of  1833.  The  first  was  the  treatment  of 
moral  questions  under  the  symbolism  of   poetry.      Of 


The  Poems  of  1833  85 

this  symbolic  poetry  he  afterwards  produced  a  few  ex- 
amples. The  Vision  of  Sin,  made  in  1842,  is  one.  There 
is  a  dream  in  In  Afemoriam  which  may  be  said  to  be 
another  example.  Within  the  main  allegory  of  the  /dy//s 
of  the  King  there  are  other  examples  to  be  found.  The 
dream  in  Sea  Dreams  is  another.  Of  these  there  are  not 
tnany,  for  this  species  of  poetry,  which  embodies  a  moral 
problem  in  a  highly  ornamented  vision,  is  as  exceedingly 
difficult  to  do  well,  as  it  is  exceedingly  easy  to  do  badly. 
When  Tennyson  did  it,  he  gave  all  his  powers  to  it,  and 
was  not  content  till  he  had  wrought  it,  by  change  after 
change,  into  the  most  careful  and  skilful  finish.  There  is 
only  one  poem  in  this  volume  of  1833  which  is  in  this 
manner.  It  is  The  Palace  of  Art,  and  it  stands  out  clear 
— a  new  thing,  a  fresh  effort. 

As  we  read  it  in  the  volume  of  1833,  it  has  many  weak 
lines.  So  far  as  composition  goes,  it  is  often  all  awry. 
Often  we  say  to  ourselves,  "  Would  this  were  better." 
But  as  we  read  it  in  the  volume  of  1842,  when  it  had 
received  eight  years  of  recasting  and  polishing,  it  is  one 
of  the  most  perfect  of  Tennyson's  poems.  To  compare 
the  first  draft  of  this  poem  with  the  second,  or  to  com- 
pare the  first  draft  of  (Enone  with  the  second,  is  not  only 
to  receive  a  useful  lesson  in  the  art  of  poetry — it  is  also 
to  understand,  far  better  than  by  any  analysis  of  his  life, 
a  great  part  of  Tennyson's  character  ;  his  impatience 
for  perfection,  his  steadiness  in  pursuit  of  it,  his  power 
of  taking  pains,  the  long  intellectual  consideration  he 
gave  to  matters  which  originated  in  the  emotions,  his 


86  Tennyson 

love  of  balancing  this  and  that  form  of  his  thought 
against  one  another,  and  when  the  balancing  was  done, 
the  unchangeableness  of  his  acceptance  of  one  form, 
and  of  his  rejection  of  another  ;  and  finally,  correlative 
with  these  (qualities,  his  want  of  impulse  and  rush  in 
song,  as  in  life — English,  not  Celtic  at  all.  These  quali- 
ties appear  in  his  elaborate  recasts  of  his  poems,  and 
when  we  compare  the  recasts  with  their  originals,  the 
man,  as  well  as  the  artist,  seems  to  grow  before  us  into 
actual  being. 

But,  returning  to  the  poem,  it  marks  the  first  rising  in 
his  mind  of  thought  on  the  graver  questions  of  life  ;  not 
thought  on  the  world  around  him,  or  on  any  question  as 
it  affects  humanity,  but  on  a  question  concerning  himself 
and  his  duty  as  an  artist.  "  Shall  I  love  art  and  beauty 
which  I  shape  in  art  for  the  sake  of  art  alone,  beauty  for 
beauty  only  ;  knowledge  only  for  the  sake  of  the  beauty 
it  brings  to  me  ?  Shall  I  live,  apart  from  the  Avorld  of  men, 
and  work  with  no  desire  to  help,  exalt,  or  console  the  blind 
and  ugly  herd  of  men  ? "  This  is  a  question  that  we  ask 
in  the  present  day,  and  some  answer,  "  Yes,  beauty  only, 
beauty  for  its  own  sake — art  without  any  aim  of  love  in 
it — art  in  isolation  from  mankind  !  "  And  they  retire  to 
a  sheltered  solitude  and  sing  their  song  alone,  refusing 
to  hear,  behind  their  hushed  tapestries,  the  cry  of  human 
sorrow  for  human  love.  What  is  their  fate  ?  They  lose 
love,  for  love  is  only  gained  by  loving  ;  and  they  lose 
the  beauty  they  desired  to  grasp,  for  beauty  is  the  child 
of  love.     Outside  the  power  of  loving  man,  no  beauty 


The   Poems  of  1833  87 

lasts.  And  finally,  having  none  to  love,  and  therefore 
nothing  to  take  them  out  of  themselves,  they  are  wholly 
thrown  on  themselves.  Their  only  companion  is  their 
self,  and  this  is  absolute  horror  and  dismay. 

This,  then,  was  his  subject,  and  he  puts  it  in  the  In- 
troduction. I  write,  he  says,  a  sort  of  allegory  of  a  soul 
that  loved  beauty  only,  and  good  and  knowledge  only 
for  their  beauty,  and  who  shut  out  Love  : 

And  he  that  shuts  out  Love,  in  turn  shall  be 
Shut  out  from  Love,  and  on  her  threshold  lie 
Howling  in  outer  darkness. 

It  is  a  good  subject  for  an  essay  or  a  sermon,  but  when 
an  artist  seizes  it  as  the  subject  of  a  poem  it  must  first 
be  filled  with  human  passion  ;  and  secondly  it  must  be 
ornamented  with  lovely  images.  Passion  is  given  to  it 
by  Tennyson  by  making  the  soul  a  person  who  goes 
through  pride  to  dreadful  pain,  and  through  pain  into 
rei^entance.  Beauty  is  given  to  it  by  the  description  of 
the  palace  which  embodies  all  the  various  arts  and  wis- 
dom of  the  world  in  imaginative  symbolism.  And  surely 
no  more  superb  and  lovely  house  was  ever  built  by  the 
wit  of  man.     Take  two  verses  out  of  many  :* 

Four  courts  I  made — east,  vilest,  and  south  and  north, 

In  each  a  squared  lawn,  wherefrom 
The  golden  gorge  of  dragons  spouted  forth 

A  flood  of  fountain-foam. 

*  I  have  quoted  the  passages  in  this  poem  from  the  revised  version 
of  1842.     No  poem  of   Tennyson's  underwent  more  revision. 


88  Tennyson 

And  round  the  cool  green  courts  there  ran  a  row 

Of  cloisters,  branch'd  like  mighty  woods, 
Echoing  all  night  to  that  sonorous  flow 

Of  spouted  fountain-floods. 

The  vowels  roll  and  ring,  and  the  ornament  is  lovely — 
ornament  which  Tennyson  takes  care  to  introduce  be- 
tween his  successive  representations  of  the  state  of  the 
soul.  The  whole  palace  is  dedicated  to  loveliness.  The 
rooms  are  filled  with  the  great  painters'  art  ;  all  fair 
landscape  is  there,  and  pictures  of  great  romance  from 
Christian  history,  from  Arabia,  India,  Greece,  and. 
Rome  ;  portraits  of  the  great  poets  ;  and  on  the  floors, 
in  choicely  planned  mosaic,  is  wrought  the  human  tale 
of  the  wide  world's  history  ;  while  all  philosophy  and 
knowledge — in  the  chiming  bells,  and  in  melodies  and 
in  the  lights  that  lit  the  domes — were  heard  and  real- 
ised.    There  lived  the  soul  alone  unto  herself. 

And  "  while  the  world  runs  round  and  round,"  I  said, 
"  Reign  thou  apart,  a  quiet  king — " 

She  took  her  throne  : 
She  sat  betwixt  the  shining  Oriels, 
To  sing  her  songs  alone. 

Communing  with  herself  :  "  All  these  are  mine, 

And  let  the  world  have  peace  or  wars, 
*T  is  one  to  me." 

"  I  take  possession  of  man's  mind  and  deed, 

I  care  not  what  the  sects  may  brawl. 
I  sit  as  God,  holding  no  form  of  creed. 

But  contemplating  all." 


i  The   Poems  of  1833  89 

Full  oft  the  riddle  of  the  painful  earth 

Flash'd  thro'  her  as  she  sat  alone. 
Yet  not  the  less  held  she  her  solemn  mirth, 

And  intellectual  throne. 

Then  comes  the  punishment,  full  of  human  interest, 
and  wrought  with  an  emotion  which  lifts  it  above  the 
level  of  mere  symbolism.  Despair,  confusion  of  mind, 
fear  and  hatred  of  solitude,  self-scorn,  terrible  silence, 
hatred  of  life  and  death,  entombment  in  fire  within,  fell 
on  her.     At  last  she  cried  : 

"  What  is  it  that  will  take  away  my  sin 
And  save  me  lest  I  die  ?  " 

And  out  of  the  repentant  cry  came  escape  from  the 
dread  comradeship  of  her  self.  "  I  will  return  to  humil- 
ity and  to  love,  to  lowly  life  with  men  and  women. 

'  Make  me  a  cottage,  in  the  vale,'  she  said, 
'  Where  I  may  mourn  and  pray  ; ' 

for  *  love  is  of  the  valley,'  and  when  love  is  learned  I 
will  return  to  my  palace  ;  for  when  I  love,  and  return 
with  others  there,  bringing  all  I  love  with  me  to  enjoy 
with  me — the  beauty  which  turned  to  corruption  when  I 
was  alone  will  live  again  in  glory." 

This  is  Tennyson's  confession  of  the  duties  of  his  art, 
and  of  the  law  of  its  practice  ;  and  it  is  characteristic  of 
this  conclusion  that  now  for  the  first  time  he  begins  that 
poetry  of  common  human  life,  of  the  daily  love  of  child 
and  lover  and  wife  and  father  and  mother,  of  the  ordi- 
nary sorrows   and  joys  of  men   and  women,  which   he 


go  Tennyson 

wove  all  his  life  long  with  so  much  sweetness,  tender- 
ness, and  power,  in  homespun  thread  and  colour,  that 
there  is  no  class,  of  wdiatever  rank  and  knowledge,  wno 
will  not  take  pleasure  in  it  for  all  time,  who  will  not  love 
him  for  it.  What  Wordsworth  had  done  for  the  begin- 
ning of  this  century,  Tennyson  has  done  for  the  midst 
of  it.  He  brought  us  into  touch  with  the  general  human 
heart  in  the  midst  of  common  life.  Shelley,  Keats,  and 
Byron  had  not  done  this,  nor  Southey,  Coleridge,  or 
Scott.  Since  the  waters  of  the  Lyrical  Ballads  had 
streamed  into  the  heart  of  man,  this  simple,  fruitful  sub- 
ject had  been  neglected  by  other  poets  than  Words- 
worth ;  this  subject  which  lies  among  the  roots  of  the 
tree  of  all  the  arts,  and  which,  when  other  subjects  of  a 
more  grand  or  fantastic  kind  are  exhausted,  sends  its 
ever  youthful  life  into  the  tree,  and  renews  the  arts.  Its 
essence,  pure  and  faithful  love,  is  eternal  in  the  human 
heart,  and  beyond  it,  in  all  spirits,  and  in  God  Himself. 
It  takes  in  every  true  sorrow  and  true  joy.  It  is  univer- 
sal, and  yet  its  forms  are  infinite.  It  is  everywhere,  like 
the  grass  that  we  love  so  well,  and  of  which  we  never 
weary.  All  men,  women,  and  children  feel  and  under- 
stand it.  It  varies  from  the  lowest  note  of  the  common- 
place to  the  highest  note  of  imaginative  passion,  and  the 
artist  can  choose  whatever  note  he  pleases  to  strike. 
There  are  many  other  subjects  for  the  poet  ;  but  if  he 
wish  to  initiate  a  new  world  of  song,  this  is  one  of  the 
subjects  to  which  he  must  devote  a  part  of  his  work  ; 
and  we   shall   find,  when   we  are   out   of   this  transition 


The   Poems  of  1833  9^ 

period  of  poetry  in  which  we  live  at  present  and  are 
fully  w^earied  with  its  fantasies  of  Nature  and  passion 
and  words,  that  the  poet  who  will  recreate  our  song  will 
take  up  again  the  common  love  and  life  of  men.  He 
will  drink  of  the  wayside  fountains  of  humanity. 

It  was  thus  now  with  Tennyson.  He  began  this  vein 
with  The  May  Queen,  to  which  the  galloping  verse  has 
sometimes  given  an  air  of  sentimentalism.  The  same 
things  would  have  made  a  different  impression  had  the 
verse  been  shorter  in  line,  and  a  little  statelier  in  form. 
But  it  is  sweet  and  gracious  enough,  and  the  mother,  the 
poor  pretty  child  and  Robin  her  lover  are  our  friends. 
He  began  it  also  with  The  Af tiler  s  Daughter,  a  simple 
story  of  true  sweethearting  and  married  love  ;  but  raised 
by  the  loveliness  of  the  scenery  which  is  inwoven  with 
charm  and  grace  into  the  tale,  and  by  the  simplicity  of 
the  expression,  into  a  steady  and  grave  emotion,  worthy 
of  a  love  built  to  last  for  life  betwixt  a  man  and  woman. 
This  was  the  sort  of  love  for  which  Tennyson  cared,  for 
which  Byron  and  Shelley  did  not  care,  which  was  not  in 
the  world  where  Keats  lived  at  all — but  which  w-as  in 
Wordsworth's  world,  and  which,  after  all  our  excursions 
into  phases  of  passion,  is  not  only  the  deepest  and  high- 
est of  the  affections,  but  the  father  and  mother  of  all  the 
other  loves  of  earth.  It  was  first  in  Tennyson's  mind, 
but  it  had  many  companions.  Love  of  many  kinds,  joy 
and  sorrow  of  many  kinds,  as  they  were  felt  by  the  com- 
mon human  heart,  not  only  by  the  great,  but  by  the 
lowly  upon  earth,  were  now  his  interest,  and  many  and 


92 


Tennyson 


lovely  were  the  poems  he  dedicated  to  them.  Who  is 
likely  to  forget  Dora,  The  Gardeners  Daughter,  Sea 
Dreams,  The  Brook,  Enoch  Arden,  and  a  host  of  others  ? 
This  is  the  democratic  element  in  Tennyson.  It  is,  in 
all  its  phases,  the  democracy  of  the  artist. 


CHAPTER   III 


THE   POEMS   OF    1 842 


I  DO  not  think  that  since  the  time  of  Shakspere  there 
have  been  in  England  any  poets  so  close  to  the  life 
of  their  own  time  as  Tennyson  and  Browning  ;  no, 
not  even  Wordsworth.  Other  men,  like  Pope,  have  got 
as  close,  or  even  closer,  to  distinct  phases  of  thought  or 
classes  of  society,  but  Tennyson  and  Browning  settled 
themselves  down  to  paint  as  far  as  they  could  all  classes 
and  their  interests.  They  did  this  in  different  ways,  but 
they  both  had  a  more  universal  aim  than  their  prede- 
cessors, and  covered  a  much  larger  and  more  various 
extent  of  ground.  Of  course  they  had  more  opportu- 
nities, more  means.  The  steam-road,  with  its  rapid 
travelling,  extended  literature  to  the  country  and 
brought  the  country  into  contact  with  the  towns.  The 
poet  in  London  or  the  poet  in  the  Isle  of  Wight  touched 
a  great  number  of  different  types  of  men  which  would 
have  remained  unknown  to  him  fifty  years  before.  In 
the  same  way  the  manifold  forms  of  natural  scenery  in 
England  or  abroad  were  much  more  easily  brought  to 

93 


94  Tennyson 

liis  knowledge.  Moreover  Tennyson  and  Browning 
were  lucky  in  their  time.  Their  present  was  full  of  as- 
piration, of  ideals,  of  questioning,  of  excitement.  They 
were  like  ships  floating  into  a  great  sea-loch,  on  a  brim- 
ming tide  and  with  a  favouring  wind. 

Tennyson's  interest  in  the  humanity  of  his  own  day 
now  grew  continuously.  I  shall  show  in  the  next  chap- 
ter how  he  could  not  help  modernising  the  Greek  and 
the  romantic  subjects  of  which  he  treated.  Keats  went 
away  to  Athens  or  Florence,  and  living  in  an  alien  age 
forgot  his  own  time.  Tennyson  said  to  Ulysses  or 
Arthur,  "  Come  down  from  the  ancient  days,  and  live 
with  me,  here  in  England."  And  they  came  ;  and  did 
their  best  to  wear  the  modern  dress.  When  we  turn 
from  these  Greek  subjects,  we  find  him  altogether  Eng- 
lish and  modern.  A  series  of  poems  entered  into  various 
phases  of  youthful  love.  The  Gardener's  Daughter 
painted  with  beauty  and  simplicity  the  upspringing  of 
the  fountain  of  love  in  a  young  artist's  soul,  and  car- 
ried it  on  to  marriage.  And  the  love  was  set  in  a  frame- 
work of  soft  and  flower-haunted  English  scenery,  every 
touch  of  which,  in  Tennyson's  way,  was  woven  into  the 
feelings  of  the  two  young  hearts.  Moreover,  though  I 
think  that  the  collecting  of  the  story  round  two  pictures 
is  awkward,  it  enables  Tennyson  to  throw  over  this  tale 
of  first  love  the  glamour  and  tenderness  of  memory. 
The  man  who  tells  it  has  lost  the  wife  of  his  youth, 
whose  picture  he  shows  to  his  friend.  The  loveliness  of 
unselfish  sorrow,  which   makes   remembrance  joyful  in 


The  Poems  of   1842  95 

regret,  veils  the  story  with  the  delicate  vapour  of  spirit- 
ual love.  At  first  reading,  there  is  a  want  of  closeness, 
of  reality  in  the  feeling  described.  But  when  we  know 
that  it  is  a  mature  man  recalling  what  has  been  when 
she  whom  he  loved  of  old  has  long  since  been  in  the 
heavenly  life,  we  understand  how  the  clear  edges  of 
passion  melt  into  ideal  mist  ;  and  then  we  read  the 
poem  from  the  poet's  point  of  view. 

77/1?  Talking  Oak  is  another  poem  of  youthful  love. 
The  lover  to  whom  the  tree  speaks  of  his  maiden  and 
who  tells  the  tree  of  her,  is  a  motive  which  has  been 
often  used,  but  never  with  greater  skill  and  charm. 
There  is  a  youthful  animation,  and  a  happy  chivalry  in 
rivalry  of  praise  between  the  lover  and  the  tree,  which 
are  full  of  natural  grace,  that  quality  somewhat  rare  in 
Tennyson,  who  was  frequently  too  academic,  too  careful 
in  his  work  to  attain  it.  In  this  poem,  also,  his  in- 
weaving of  Nature's  heart  with  the  heart  of  man  is  more 
than  plain.  The  oak  talks  to  the  lover.  Nay,  the  oak 
itself  is  in  love  with  the  maiden.  His  very  sap  is  stirred 
by  her  kiss.  He  drops  an  acorn  on  her  breast  ;  and  'he 
half-jealous  lover  knows  that  he  need  not  be  jealous. 
Above  all,  there  is  no  poem  more  English  in  all  the 
poems  of  Tennyson.  We  see  the  park,  the  Chase  that 
Englishmen  of  all  ranks  love  so  w^ell  ;  the  roofs  of  the 
great  house  above  the  trees  ;  the  wild  woodland  deeii  in 
fern,  the  deer,  the  mighty  trees,  the  oak  which  has 
w^atched  so  many  English  generations,  so  much  of  Eng- 
lish historv — bluff  Harrv  who  turned  the  monks  adrift — 


g6  Tennyson 

the  Roundhead  humming  his  surly  hymn — the  modish 
beauties  of  the  Court  of  Anne — the  English  girl  of  to- 
day who  leaves  her  novel  and  piano  to  race  singing 
through  the  park.  This  is  Tennyson  close  down  to  his 
own  land,  vitally  interested  in  modern  life,  and  the 
thing  and  its  method  are  new  in  English  poetry.  The 
same  springtide  of  love  is  described  in  Locksley  Hall  zx^^ 
in  the  gay  delightfulness  of  The  Day-Dream^  with  its 
modern  applications  ;  but  in  Locksley  Hall  we  pass  on 
into  one  of  those  graver  phases  of  love  which  Tennyson 
now  treated.  The  hero's  love  suffers  a  mean  disillusion, 
and  he  is  angry  like  a  boy  ;  but  in  Love  and  Duty  the 
matter  is  more  serious.  Two  love  one  another,  whom 
duty  forbids  to  fulfil  their  love.  Was  the  love  fruitless, 
did  it  turn  to  dust  ?  Because  passion  was  denied,  were 
two  lives  ruined  ?  No,  is  the  answer  of  Tennyson.  Be- 
cause duty  was  lord  over  passion  and  drove  their  lives 
apart,  love  itself,  honoured  more  in  giving  up  than  in 
taking  an  earthly  joy  contrary  to  righteousness,  lasted  in 
both  hearts,  unstained  and  lovely,  and  bettered  both 
their  lives.  The  man,  emerging  from  himself,  gained  the 
higher  love,  and  never  knew 

The  set  gray  life,  and  apathetic  end. 

The  woman  knew,  wlien  the  parting  was  over,  that  all 

Life  needs  for   life  is  possible  to  will. 

And  happiness  came  to  her,  and  freedom,  and  the  dis- 
tant light  was  pure. 


The  Poems  of  1842  97 

There  was  a  conviction  in  Tennyson's  mind  that  the 
sanctity  of  the  marriage  tie  was  one  of  the  eternal  foun- 
dations of  all  true  personal,  social,  and  national  life  ; 
that  no  amount  of  passionate  love  excused  its  breakage. 
This  is  not  the  view  of  the  artists  in  general,  but  it  is 
the  view  which  prevails  in  the  English  nation.  And 
Tennyson  felt  and  represented  it  all  through  his  poetry. 
It  is  a  sin  against  that,  with  all  its  excuses  also  stated, 
which,  in  his  recast  of  the  Arthurian  story,  overthrows 
the  whole  life-work  of  the  king  and  brings  about  the  last 
great  battle  and  the  death.  It  is  to  establish  the  true 
idea  of  marriage  as  he  conceived  it  that  The  Princess 
was  written  ;  and  a  number  of  other  poems,  enshrining 
his  reverence  "for  long-continued  faithfulness  through  all 
the  troubles  of  domestic  life,  and  culminating  in  the 
honour  he  gave  to  the  Crown,  chiefly  for  this  reason, 
make  him,  even  more  than  Wordsworth,  the  poet  of  the 
sanctity  of  marriage.  Love  and  Duty  seems  to  be  the 
first  of  these  poems. 

Two  things  are,  however,  curious  in  this  poem.  One  is 
the  passionate  meeting  of  the  lovers.  From  Tennyson's 
steady  point  of  view  married  faith  which  permitted  what 
he  relates  is  not  faith  at  all.  And  if  it  was  not  marriage, 
but  some  other  duty  which  stood  in  the  way,  then  the 
intensity  of  the  piece  is  overdone.  That  is  the  first  curi- 
ous thing,  and  the  second  is  the  predominance  of  the 
man  in  the  matter.  It  is  he  that  feels  the  most  ;  it  is  he 
that  directs  the  whole  business  of  duty.  It  is  he  that 
expresses    passion,  or  allows  it  to  be  expressed.     It  is 


98  Tennyson 

he  alone  who  is  strong,  who  alone  resists  ;  and  when 
both  retire  into  steady  life,  he  alone  does  work  ;  "  he  is 
most  Godlike,  being  most  a  man,"  and  he  uses  his  self- 
conquest  to  improve  the  world  ;  but  the  woman  tends 
her  flowers,  is  sadly  happy,  dreams  a  little  by  day, 
dreams  more  at  night,  and  does  no  human  work  at  all, 
In  The  Princess,  Tennyson  expands  another  view,  being 
somewhat  forced  into  it  by  his  subject.  But,  on  the 
Avhole,  this  subordinate  position  of  woman,  or  rather 
this  instinctive  dominance  of  the  man,  is  a  weakness,  at 
least  from  our  modern  point  of  view,  in  his  work.  He 
never  conceives  womanhood  quite  clearly.  The  mas- 
culine is  too  strong  in  him  for  that,  and  its  prepon- 
derance is  the  cause  why  few  of  his  women  have  the 
weight,  the  worth,  or  the  character  some  other  poets 
give  them.  Wordsworth's  picture  of  his  sister,  his  short 
poem  to  his  wife,  his  Affliction  of  Margaret*  his  High- 

*  Compare  the  passion  of  motherhood  as  expressed  in  this  mag- 
nificent poem  with  that  of  Psyche  in  The  Princess  in  the  lines  be- 
ginning 

Ah  me,  my  babe,  my  blossom,  ah,  my  child, 
My  one  sweet  child,  whom  I  shall  see  no  more. 

There  is  no  comparison.  Indeed,  the  motherhood  in  Wordsworth's 
The  Complaint  and  in  Her  eyes  are  wild  is  closer,  more  intimate  to  the 
primal  passion,  than  anything  in  Tennyson,  save  always  the  intense 
penetration  of  Rizpah. 

My  baby,  the  bones  that  had  suck'd  me,  the  bones  that  had  laughed 

and  cried — 
Theirs  ?     O,  no  !  tliey  are  mine — not  theirs — they  had  moved  in  my 

side. 

That  is  as  great  as  Nature  herself. 


The   Poems  of   1842  99 

land  Girl,  any  of  his  women,  are  of  more  reality  than 
the  women  of  Tennyson.  It  seems,  and  it  is  a  fault  in  a 
poet,  as  if  at  the  bottom  of  his  mind,  and  in  spite  of  his 
Princess,  he  tended  to  the  view  of  woman  which  his 
angry  boy  expresses  in  Locksley  Hall : 

Woman  is  the  lesser  man,  and  all  thy  passions,  match'd  with  mine, 
Are  as  moonlight  unto  sunlight,  and  as  water  unto  wine. 

This  is,  of  course,  continually  modified.  He  is  always 
trying  to  conceive  women  as  higher  than  this,  and  he 
succeeds  ;  but  a  blind  pull  in  his  mind,  growing  out  of 
his  nature,  appears  to  draw  him  back  to  this  lower  con- 
ception. He  cannot  get  his  women  of  equal  worth  with 
his  men.  One  of  the  results  of  this  is  that  there  is  no 
vital  or  supreme  passion  between  the  sexes  expressed  by 
Tennyson.  There  is  always  a  certain  element  of  conde- 
scension in  the  man,  and  where  there  is  a  shred  of  con- 
descension there  is  no  supreme  passion.  The  nearest  he 
gets  to  it  is  in  the  expression  of  the  longing  for  lost  love, 
and  this  is  expressed  by  the  man  rather  than  by  the 
woman.*  It  is  the  man  who  utters  in  Maud  that  most 
sorrowful  and  lovely  of  all  Tennyson's  cries  : 

*  There  are  always  exceptions  to  be  found  to  general  statements 
of  this  kind,  and  they  are  frequently  strong  exceptions.  Elaine  draws 
near  to  such  an  exception,  and  the  song  in  The  Princess — "Tears, 
idle  tears,"  is  sung  by  a  girl,  and  she  sings  it  in  her  own  person. 
The  lines : 

Dear  as  remember'd  kisses  after  death, 

And  sweet  as  those  by  hopeless  fancy  feign'd 

On  lips  that  are  for  others  ; 

are  intimate  with  a  passion  elsewhere  almost  unknown  in  Tennyson, 


lOO  Tennyson 

O  that  't  were  possible, 
After  long  grief  and  pain, 
To  find  the  arms  of  my  true  love 
Round  me  once  again  ! 

But  of  the  longing  for  lost  love  there  are  two  poems,  one 
in  this  book,  and  one  included  in  it  a  little  later,  which 
record  the  wild  love-sorrow  of  men.  One  is  a  kind 
of  ballad,  Edivard  Gray,  and  the  greater  part  of  it  at- 
tains power  through  its  simplicity,  but  Tennyson  was 
led  away  at  the  end,  and  the  poem  passes  into  weak- 
ness. Fancy  and  reflection  come  in  when  the  passion 
is  over,  and  we  are  left  a  little  disenchanted.  I  wish 
the  last  three  verses  were  expunged.  The  other  is 
a  poem  of  much  greater  force,  fully  conceived,  and 
sounding  its  way  through  deeper  waters  than  we  often 
try  to  fathom  in  Tennyson.  Its  motive,  while  uncom- 
mon, is  adequate  to  the  emotion  expressed.     Here  it  is  : 

Come  not,  when  I  am  dead. 

To  drop  thy  foolish  tears  upon  my  grave, 

To  trample  round  my  fallen  head, 

And  vex  the  unhappy  dust  thou  wouldst  not  save. 

There  let  the  wind  sweep  and  the  plover  cry  ; 
But  thou,  go  by. 

Child,  if  it  were  thine  error  or  thy  crime, 

I  care  no  longer,  being  all  unblest  ; 
Wed  whom  thou  wilt,  but  I  am  sick  of  Time 

And  I  desire  to  rest. 
Pass  on,  weak  heart,  and  leave  me  where  I  lie  ; 
Go  by,  go  by. 

Weariness  of  love  after  long  anger  of  love,  weariness  of 
life  from  weariness  of  love,  and,  beneath  both,  unforget- 


The   Poems  of   1842  loi 

ful  tenderness,  were  rarely  better  expressed.  But,  to 
close  these  notes  on  the  love  poems  in  this  volume,  it 
is  somewhat  strange,  but  illustrative  of  what  I  have  said 
about  the  dominance  of  the  man  in  Tennyson,  that 
the  poem  of  fullest  regret  for  love  drowned  in  death  is 
written  in  memory  of  a  man.  Every  one  knows  it  ;  it  is 
a  piece  of  perfect  work,  fully  felt,  and  fully  finished, 
simple  and  profound — and  with  what  fine  art  Nature 
is  inwoven  with  its  passion  ! 

Break,  break,  break, 

On  thy  cold  gray  stones,  O  Sea, 
And  I  would  that  my  tongue  could  utter 

The  thoughts  that  arise  in  me. 

There  is  no  need  to  quote  the  rest :  it  lives  in  the 
memory  of  man. 

Along  with  these  poems  of  love  arose  poems  of  mod- 
ern life,  half  dramatic,  half  idyllic  ;  dramatic  idylls — 
some  of  a  serious,  even  stately  simplicity,  quite  close  to 
common  human  life,  like  Dora,  which  is  a  little  master- 
piece ;  others  of  a  homespun  humour  mingled  with  im- 
aginative thought,  like  Audlcy  Court  and  The  Golden 
Year  ;  and  others  full  of  that  honest  University  humour 
which  characterises  the  talk  of  Englishmen  when  they 
are  on  a  vacation  tour,  like  Walking  to  the  Mail  and 
Edwin  Morris.  These  are  pure  modernisms  ;  they  also 
are  new  in  English  poetry  ;  they  have  opened  a  vein 
which  many  others  may  work  at,  and  they  have  opened 
it  in  an  excellent  and  varied  way.  The  very  similes 
Tennyson  uses  in  them  are  in  harmony  with  the  charac- 


T02  Tennyson 

ter  of  the  poems,  similes  drawn  from  every-day  sounds 
and  sights,  and  so  vital  with  observation  of  common 
English  life  and  things  that  they  seem  to  illuminate  the 
page  with  England. 


A  body  slight  and  round,  and  like  a  pear 
In  growing,  modest  eyes,  a  hand,  a  foot 
Lessening  in  perfect  cadence,  and  a  skin 
As  clean  and  white  as  privet  when  it  flowers. 

James — you  know  him — old,  but  full 
Of  force  and  choler,  and  firm  upon  his  feet, 
And  like  an  oaken  stock  in  winter  woods, 
O'erflourish'd  by  the  hoary  clematis. 


He  laugh'd,  and  I,  though  sleepy,  like  a  horse 
That  hears  the  corn-bin  open,  prick'd  my  ears. 


Scattered  through  these  poems,  and  in  accordance 
with  all  I  have  said  of  Tennyson's  incorporation  of 
Nature  and  the  heart  of  man,  are  lovely,  true,  and  inti- 
mate descriptions  of  Nature  in  England,  done  with  an 
art  which  never  forgot  itself,  and  which  seemed  some- 
times too  elaborate  in  skill.  Indeed,  we  should  often 
feel  this,  were  it  not  that  the  full  product  gives  so  com- 
plete a  pleasure. 

The  Gardener's  Daughter  is  alive  with  such  descrip- 
tions ;  and  it  would  be  worth  while  to  read  that  of  the 
entrance  into  the  garden.  Step  by  step,  as  we  move  on, 
the  changing  scene  is  painted.  We  walk  through  the 
landscape  with  Tennyson.     This  garden-passage  begins  : 


The  Poems  of   1842  103 

We  reach'd  a  meadow  slanting  to  the  north. 
When  the  last  line  strikes  the  ear, 

The  twinkling  laurel  scatter'd  silver  lights, 

it  is  meant  to  paint  the  very  thing  by  words  ;  but  a  far 
finer  instance  of  this,  where  the  line  is  so  arranged  in 
sound  as  to  be  itself  what  he  describes,  is  towards  the 
end  of  the  poem  : 

Or  as  once  we  met 
Unheedful  tho',  beneath  a  whispering  rain 
Night  slid  down  one  long  stream  of  sighing  wind. 
And  in  her  bosom  bore  the  baby,  Sleep. 

Nor  can  I  pass  by  that  description  of  the  Lincoln 
meadows,  near  the  town,  lush  in  thick  grass  and  in 
broad  waters,  and  deep  in  wind-washed  trees — 

Not  wholly  in  the  busy  world,  nor  quite 
Beyond  it,  blooms  the  garden  that  I  love. 
News  from  the  humming  city  comes  to  it 
In  sound  of  funeral  or  of  marriage  bells  ; 
And,  sitting  muilled  in  dark  leaves,  you  hear 
The  windy  clanging  of  the  minster  clock  ; 
Although  between  it  and  the  garden  lies 
A  league  of  grass,  wasli'd  by  a  slow  broad  stream, 
That,  stirr'd  with  languid  pulses  of  the  oar, 
Waves  all  its  lazy  lilies,  and  creeps  on. 
Barge-laden,  to  three  arches  of  a  bridge 
Crown'd  with  the  minster-towers. 

The  fields  between 
Are  dewy-fresh,  browsed  by  deep-udder'd  kine. 
And  all  about  the  large  lime  feathers  low, 
The  lime  a  summer  home  of  murmurous  wings. 


I04  Tennyson 

The  close  of  Audlcy  Court  is  as  near  to  truth  ; 

The  town  was  hiish'd  beneath  us  :  lower  down 
The  bay  was  oily-calm  ;  the  harbour  buoy, 
With  one  green  sparkle  ever  and  anon 
Dipt  by  itself,  and  we  were  glad  at  heart. 

That  is  evening,  when  the  moon  is  high  :  here  is  morning 
lifting  herself  in  exultation  : 

Then  when  the  first  low  matin-chirp  hath  grown 
Full  quire,  and  morning  driv'n  her  plow  of  pearl,* 
Far  furrowing  into  light  the  mounded  rack, 
Beyond  the  fair  green  field  and  eastern  lea. 

This  has  that  classic  note  of  Milton,  but  it  is  quite 
original.  There  are  many  touches  of  Nature  as  fine  as 
this  in  Locksley  Hall,  but  that  poem  has  far  more  to  do 
with  man  than  with  Nature.  It  is,  however,  set  in  land- 
scape which  reflects  the  temper  of  the  hero — sandy 
tracks  on  which  the  ocean  thunders  and  the  curlews 
cry — the  sea-shore  on  one  side,  and  the  moorland  on 
the  other  ;  and  at  the  last,  the  vapour  blackening  from 
the  moor  with  the  blast  in  its  breast  to  fall  on  Locksley 
Hall. 

Every  one  knows  this  poem.  Its  form  is  good,  its 
divisions  clear.  It  passes  from  one  division  to  another 
with  ease  and  imagination.  Every  one  knows  the  hero, 
with  his  hour  of  happy  love,  his  rage  of  disillusion,  his 

*  Compare  the  lines  in  The  Princess  : 

Morn  in  the  white  wake  of  the  morning  star 
Came  furrowing  all  the  orient  into  gold. 


The   Poems  of   1842  105 

hope  at  the  end  that  the  living  present  may  excite  him 
by  its  science,  and  give  him  back  his  youthful  inspira- 
tion. I  never  thought  that  this  blustering  youth,  "  weak 
as  is  a  breaking  wave,"  whom  Tennyson  invented  so 
well,  and  who  is  so  true  to  a  common  type — a  type  he 
lowers  much  further  in  the  hero  of  Maud — would  find 
any  inspiration  in  science  or  the  march  of  commerce ; 
and  the  second  Locksley  Hall,  where  Tennyson  draws 
the  same  personage  after  he  had  settled  on  his  lees, 
proves  that  he  got  no  good  out  of  science  or  the  British 
carrying  trade.  But  how  modern  it  all  is  ;  how  kindled 
Tennyson  is  by  the  time  in  which  he  was  living,  how 
alive  to  its  wants,  its  strife,  its  faults,  its  good  !  We  are 
miles  and  miles  away  from  the  temper  in  which  Keats 
or  Shelley  regarded  their  world. 

Three  other  poems  in  this  volume  may  be  called  theo- 
logical, and  grouped  together  :  St.  Simeon  Stylites,  The 
Two  Voices,  and  The  Visioti  of  Sin.  The  first  is  a  study 
of  the  type  of  the  ascetic  in  its  extreme.  Neverthe- 
less, so  ably,  so  robustly,  and  yet  so  delicately  is  it 
done  that  its  spirit  and  its  qualities  belong  to  the  whole 
range  of  ascetics,  from  Stylites  down  to  the  slightest 
subduer  of  the  flesh.  The  conviction  that  all  evil  lies  in 
matter  and  all  good  in  its  subjugation  ;  that  the  more 
the  flesh  is  punished,  the  more  certain  is  salvation,  and 
the  greater  the  power  of  the  punisher  over  matter,  so 
that  miracles  are  wrought ;  the  claim,  the  right  estab- 
lished over  God,  from  whom  self-inflicted  penance 
wrenches    privilege  ;    the    incessant    assertion  of  sin  in 


io6  Tennyson 

apparent  or  real  humility  lest  God  should  catch  hira 
tripping  ;  the  steady  underlying  vanity  and  boastfulness  ; 
his  contempt  of  the  flesh-ridden  people  ;  his  isolation — 
all  these  and  far  more  are  given  in  this  admirable  study, 
filled  with  thought  and  insight.  Rarely  has  Tennyson 
thrown  himself  more  completely  out  of  himself  More- 
over, and  this  is  perhaps  the  best  and  most  poetic  thing 
in  the  piece,  he  does  not  make  us  dislike  or  despise  the 
Saint.  We  touch  the  human  soul  of  one  whom  we  can 
pity,  and  even  admire.  Nearly  forty  years  of  that  mad 
existence  had  not  unmanned  the  ascetic  altogether. 
To  convey  that  impression  was  an  excellent  trait  of  art. 
I  cannot  find  a  like  pleasure  in  The  Two  Voices.  As 
much  as  Tennyson  has  gone  outside  himself  in  Simeon 
Stylites,  so  much  has  he  gone  into  himself  in  The  Two 
Voices.  A  man  may  do  that  and  be  still  poetic,  and  the 
poem  proves  this.  It  is  full  of  a  poet's  power,  espe- 
cially in  the  illustrations  taken  from  Nature,  like  that 
of  the  dragon-fly  and  the  mountain-angle  jutting  clear 
from  the  mist  ;  but  the  self-involution  of  the  poem 
l)Iaces  it  on  a  lower  level  than  poetry  which  loses  self- 
thought  in  the  creation  of  a  being  beyond  the  self  of  the 
poet.  Moreover,  the  argumentative  form  lowers  still 
more  the  power  of  making  excellent  poetry.  The  best 
part  is  where  the  disputing  voices  have  ceased  to 
talk,  where  the  poet  throws  open  the  window,  and  sees 
every  one  going  to  church  in  the  summer  morning. 

The  Vision  of  Sin  is,  on  the  contrary,  one  of  the  very 
good  things  in   this  book.      It  is  allegorical,  but   not  too 


The  Poems  of   1842  107 

allegorical.  The  youth  who  rides  to  the  palace  and  who 
rides  away  into  the  waste,  a  ruined  cynic,  dominates  the 
allegory  by  his  personality  ;  and  our  interest  in  him  and 
his  fate  is  greater  than  that  we  feel  in  the  meaning  of 
the  poem.  Nevertheless,  both  the  thoughts  and  the  alle- 
gory are  of  a  quality  as  original  as  they  are  just.  Ten- 
nyson has  never  done  better  thinking.  The  youth  who 
rides  the  horse  of  the  soul,  winged  with  aspiration  and 
imagination,  weighs  the  horse  down,  for  he  has  already 
been  mastered  by  the  flesh.  He  is  led  into  the  palace 
of  sensual  pleasure,  not  coarse  but  refined  pleasure, 
slipping  incessantly,  however,  into  coarser  forms.  The 
main  contention  of  the  allegory  is  that  subtilised  sensu- 
ality is  finally  driven,  in  order  to  capture  fresh  pleasure, 
into  wilder,  fiercer,  and  baser  forms,  till  all  pleasure 
dies.     Then  the  mist  of  satiety, 

A  vapour  heavy,  hueless,  formless,  cold, 

creeps  slowly  on  from  where  Eternal  Law,  sitting  be- 
yond the  darkness  and  the  cataract  and  annexing  the 
punishment  of  exhaustion  to  unbroken  indulgence, 
makes  himself  an  awful   rose  of  dawn. 

The  end  of  the  youth  is  shamelessness  and  malice, 
disbelief  in  love  and  goodness,  scorn  of  self  and  scorn 
of  man,  sour  cynicism — and  the  picture  of  this  state 
of  mind  is  admirably  drawn  in  the  jumping  verses  that 
follow.  But  Tennyson  does  not  leave  him  to  utter 
loss.  The  mystic  mountain  range  arises  again.  In 
the  gulf   below,  the   sensual   who  in   their  youth    were 


io8  Tennyson 

half  divine  are  devoured  by  worms,  and   quicken  into 
lower  forms  ;   but  three  Spirits   apart,  three    Spirits  of 
judgment,  speak  of  the  youth  who  has   ruined  his  life. 
The  world  beyond  takes  interest  in  him. 
The  first  says  : 

Behold  !  it  was  a  crime 
Of  sense  avenged  by  sense  that  wore  with  time. 

The  truth  could  not  be  more  briefly  or  better  put. 
Every  lust  of  sense  is  driven,  in  order  to  re-take  the 
original  pleasure,  to  increase  the  stimulant,  to  make  it 
fiercer  and  more  brutal.  At  last  no  stimulation  awakens 
the  sense,  for  the  stimulation  has  paralysed  it.  This  is 
sense  avenged  by  sense.  But  the  man  is  forced  to  go 
on  with  the  sensual  effort,  as  a  drunkard  is  forced  to  go 
on  drinking,  while  at  the  same  time  no  pleasure  attends 
the  effort.  The  sense  has  worn  with  time.  Justice  is 
done. 

But  the  loss  of  all  pleasure  has  made  him  hate  happi- 
ness, call  it  vile,  and  scorn  both  God  and  man.  So 
another  Spirit  cries  : 

The  crime  of  sense  became 
The  crime  of  malice,  and  is  equal  blame. 

Nevertheless,  the  man  is  not  wholly  lost.  Were  he 
absolutely  evil,  he  would  have  had  no  feeling,  no  scorn, 
no  mockery  ;  he  could  not  even  see  the  love  and  good- 
ness at  which  he  grins.     So  another  Spirit  answers  : 

He  had  not  wholly  quenched  his  power. 

A  little  grain  of  conscience  made  him  sour. 


The   Poems  of  1842  109 

Then  a  voice  cries,  Is  there  any  hope  ?  and  the  close  of 
the  poem  is  majestic. 

To  which  an  answer  peal'd  from  that  high  land, 
But  in  a  tongue  no  man  could  understand  ; 
And  on  the  glimmering  limit  far  withdrawn 
God  made  Himself  an  awful  rose  of  dawn. 

Moreover,  this  poem,  with  the  Ulysses,  marks  with 
great  clearness  what  an  advance  Tennyson  had  made 
in  his  art  since  1833.  It  was  plain  now  that  he 
deserved  his  audience,  and  that  he  was  determined  to 
be  more  and  more  master  of  his  art.  He  had  laboured 
at  perfecting  its  powers.  Metre  is  no  more  a  difficulty. 
The  rush  of  the  lines  of  Locksley  Hall  is  like  the  incom- 
ing of  billows  on  the  beach.  The  thing  to  be  said  is 
always  given  a  poetic  turn  ;  there  is  not  a  line  of  prose 
in  the  whole  book.  The  subjects  are  worthy,  are  human, 
are  at  our  doors.  They  are  still  evolved  out  of  his  own 
consciousness,  out  of  his  own  life  and  feeling  ;  but  they 
are  moving  on  to  the  time  when  the  subjects  will  come 
from  without,  when  the  thought  and  feeling  of  universal 
man  will  press  on  him,  and  demand  that  he  should 
express  it.  Not  only  the  present,  but  the  future  is 
beginning  to  interest  him, 

For  he  sings  of  what  the  world  will  be 
When  the  years  have  died  away. 


CHAPTER  IV 

THE    CLASSICAL    AND    ROMANTIC    POEMS    OF     1 842 
WITH  THE  LATER  CLASSICAL  POEMS 

THE  classical  poems  in  the  volume  of  1833  were  two, 
CEnone  and  The  Lotos- Eaters.  I  have  kept  them 
for  separate  treatment,  because  in  1842,  when  they 
reappeared,  they  were  so  largely  recast,  and  their  land- 
scape so  changed,  that  it  would  have  been  unfair  to 
Tennyson  to  consider  them  save  in  the  finished  form  he 
gave  them  in  1842.  In  that  year  also  he  added  another 
classical  poem  to  these,  the  Ulysses.  These  are  the 
three,  and  the  first  thing  to  think  of  is  their  landscape, 
which  is  distinct  and  invented. 

I  have  said  that  Tennyson,  when  he  worked  on  natural 
scenery  outside  of  his  own  land,  was  not  a  good  land- 
scapist.  Not  only  had  he  little  sympathy  with  southern 
Nature,  but  he  also  required  to  assimilate  during  long 
years  of  companionship  the  scenery  he  described,  before 
he  could,  with  his  full  power,  embody  it  in  verse.  But 
the  impressions  he  received  in  travel  were  brief.  They 
did  not  soak  into  him,  and  he  could  not  reproduce  them 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     iii 

well.  This,  I  said,  was  the  case  when  he  painted  direct 
from  Nature. 

But  it  is  not  the  case  when  he  invented,  when  he 
painted  from  the  vision  he  had  of  a  landscape  in  his  own 
soul.  He  saw  it,  rising  like  an  exhalation  into  form 
around  his  figures.  He  took  the  cloud-shapes,  and  com- 
posed them  slowly  ;  rejecting  this,  accepting  that,  till  he 
had  got  the  background  which  he  needed  for  CEnone, 
or  Ulysses,  or  the  mild-eyed  Lotos-eaters.  Then  his 
Nature-painting,  wherever  the  scene  is  placed,  is  fine  in 
itself,  and  necessarily  fits  the  subject.  Of  course,  he 
does  not  stand  alone  in  such  invention.  Every  poet,  as 
every  painter,  practises,  more  or  less,  this  part  of  his  art. 
Wordsworth  and  Walter  Scott  are  almost  solitary  in 
their  habit,  rarely  infringed,  of  painting  all  their  land- 
scape on  the  spot,  direct  from  Nature.  But  then,  they 
did  not  take  subjects  outside  of  their  own  country  and 
their  own  time,  or  if  they  did,  as  when  Wordsworth 
took  a  classical  subject  like  Laodamia,  they  did  not  put 
in  a  landscape. 

But  the  greater  number  of  the  poets  invent  ;  and 
there  is  no  more  fascinating  subject  in  literature,  or  one 
as  yet  more  untouched,  than  this  invented  landscape  of 
the  poets.  In  what  Avay  each  of  them  did  it  ;  their 
favourite  tricks  in  doing  it  ;  the  different  way  each  of 
them  uses  Nature  for  his  purpose  or  his  figures  ;  the 
limits  of  invented  landscape  ;  its  analogies  to  landscape 
painting — these  are  all  branches  of  the  subject,  and 
when  we  have  little  to   do    and  want  amusement,  we 


112  Tennyson 

could  not  find  happier  entertainment  than  the  study  of 
this  kind  of  Nature-painting  in  Shelley  or  Keats  or 
Spenser  ;  or,  when  we  have  done  such  a  study  of  two  or 
three  poets'  work,  than  a  comparison  of  their  separate 
methods  of  invention. 

Such  invented  landscape  is  sometimes  done  from  a 
previous  study  from  Nature  which  is  worked  up  after- 
wards into  a  picture,  and  of  this  the  landscape  in  the 
GE^ione  of  1833  is  an  instance.  At  other  times,  it  is  a 
picture  composed  out  of  various  impressions  of  diverse 
places  brought  together  into  one  landscape,  and  this  is 
the  case  with  a  number  of  the  landscapes  in  The  Revolt 
of  Islam,  and  in  the  Prometheus  Unbound.  It  is  some- 
times used  to  illustrate  the  human  passions  treated  of  in 
the  poem,  the  landscape  echoing  as  it  were  the  feelings 
of  the  persons,  even  the  progress  of  their  thoughts. 
Spenser  does  this  echoing  landscape  with  great  direct- 
ness, as  in  the  description  of  the  bower  of  Acrasia,  or  of 
the  Cave  of  Mammon,  or  of  the  haunt  of  Despair. 
Tennyson  does  it  with  great  deliberation  in  The  Lotos- 
Eaters.  Shelley,  in  the  latter  part  of  Alastor,  makes  the 
whole  scene — and  especially  the  course  of  the  river 
down  the  glen,  the  narrowing  of  the  glen,  and  the  sud- 
den opening  out  of  its  jaws  on  a  vast  landscape  lying  far 
below  in  the  dying  sunlight — image,  step  by  step,  the 
thoughts  of  his  poet  wandering  to  his  death.  Sometimes 
this  invented  landscape  is  simply  a  background,  without 
any  purpose  in  it,  only  that  the  tones  are  kept  in  har- 
mony with  the  human  action  ;  and  sometimes  it  is  done 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     113 

for  pure  pleasure  in  composing  Nature,  but  in  that  case, 
when  there  are  human  beings  in  the  foreground  of  the 
poem,  there  is  a  great  danger  lest  Nature  overwhelm 
humanity  in  the  poem,  or  lest  the  poem  lack  unity  ;  and 
both  these  pitfalls,  for  example,  are  fallen  into  by  Keats 
in  Endymion. 

In  classical  poems,  the  landscape  must  of  course  be 
invented,  unless,  like  the  Pre-Raphaelite  Brotherhood, 
the  poet  should  go  to  Troy  or  Ithaca,  and  describe 
things  as  they  are  now,  in  order  to  gain  local  colour. 
Since  the  days  of  Pre-Raphaelitism,  some  poets  have 
used  this  way,  but  for  the  most  part  they  invent  ;  and 
Tennyson  saw  his  Lotos  Island  and  the  Mount  of  Ida 
only  "  with  the  intellectual  eye."  In  CEnone,  however, 
he  began  with  direct  description,  with  his  eye  upon  the 
scene.  It  was  a  valley  in  the  Pyrenees,  we  are  told, 
which  he  chose  as  background  for  his  betrayed  maiden, 
for  Paris  and  the  goddesses,  when  he  wrote  of  them  in 
1833  ;  and  here  is  this  first  landscape  : 

There  is  a  dale  in  Ida,  lovelier 
Than  any  in  old  Ionia,  beautiful 
With  emerald  slopes  of  sunny  sward,  that  lean 
Above  the  loud  glenriver,  which  hath  worn 
A  path  thro'  steepdown  granite  walls  below 
Mantled  with  flowering  tendriltwine.     In  front 
The  cedar-shadowy  valleys  open  wide. 
Far  seen,  high  over  all  the  Godbuilt  wall 
And  many  a  snowycolumned  range  divine. 
Mounted  with  awful  sculptures — men  and  Gods, 
The  work  of  Gods — bright  on  the  dark  blue  sky 
The  windy  citadel  of  Ilion 
Shone,  like  the  crown  of  Troas. 


114  Tennyson 

As  Tennyson  thought  of  this,  he  saw  how  poor  it  was  in 
comparison  with  Avhat  he  might  do  if  he  chose.  The 
blank  verse  halts  ;  a  hurly-burly  of  vowels  like  "  Than 
any  in  old  Ionia"  is  a  sorrowful  thing  ;  there  is  no  care- 
ful composition  of  the  picture  ;  the  things  described 
have  not  that  vital  connection  one  with  the  other  which 
should  enable  the  imaginative  eye  to  follow  them  step  by 
step  down  the  valley  till  it  opens  on  the  plain  where 
Troy  stands  white,  below  its  citadel. 

Now  observe  what  an  artist  who  has  trained  his  powers 
can  make  of  his  first  rough  sketch,  when,  neglecting  what 
he  has  seen,  he  invents  and  composes  with  imaginative 
care.  Here  is  the  picture  of  1842  made  out  of  the 
sketch  of  1833  : 

There  lies  a  vale  in  Ida,  lovelier 

Than  all  the  valleys  of  Ionian  hills. 

The  swimming  vapour  slopes  athwart  the  glen. 

Puts  forth  an  arm,  and  creeps  from  pine  to  pine, 

And  loiters,  slowly  drawn.     On  either  hand 

The  lawns  and  meadow-ledges  midway  down 

Hang  rich  in  flowers,  and  far  below  them  roars 

The  long  brook  falling  thro'  the  clov'n  ravine 

In  cataract  after  cataract  to  the  sea. 

Behind  the  valley  topmost  Gargarus 

Stands  up  and  takes  the  morning  :   but  in  front 

The  gorges,  opening  wide  apart,  reveal 

Troas  and  Ilion's  column'd  citadel. 

The  crown  of  Troas. 

The  verse  is  now  weighty  and  poised  and  nobly 
paused — yet  it  moves  swiftly  enough.  The  landscape 
now  is  absolutely  clear,  and  it  is  partly  done  by  cautious 
additions  to  the  original  sketch.     Moreover,  being  seen 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842      115 

by  the  imagination  in  an  hour  of  joy,  it  is  far  truer  in 
its  details  to  Nature  than  the  previous  sketch.  In  any 
invented  landscape,  though  the  whole  has  not  been  seen 
in  Nature,  the  parts  must  be  true  to  her  ways  ;  and  noth- 
ing can  image  better  the  actual  thing  than  that  phrase 
concerning  a  lonely  peak  at  dawn,  that  it  "  takes  the 
morning"  ;  nor  the  lifting  and  slow  absorption  of  the 
mists  of  night  when  the  sun  slants  warm  into  the  pines 
of  the  glen,  than  those  slow-wrought,  concentrated  lines 
about  the  mountain  vapour. 

That  is  one  illustration  of  my  point,  and  in  this  in- 
stance the  original  has  been  expanded.  I  will  now  com- 
pare another  piece  of  the  CEnone  of  1833  with  its  new 
form  in  1842.  Here  there  is  no  expansion,  there  is  con- 
traction. The  original  was  too  diffuse  :  it  is  now  con- 
cised  with  admirable  force.  This  is  the  original 
description  of  the  coming  of  the  goddesses  : 

It  was  the  deep  midnoon  ;  one  silvery  cloud 

Had  lost  his  way  among  the  piney  hills. 

They  came — all  three — the  Olympian  goddesses  : 

Naked  they  came  to  the  smoothswarded  bower, 

Lustrous  with  lily  flower,  violeteyed 

Both  white  and  blue,  with  lotetree-fruit  thickset, 

Shadowed  with  singing  pine  ;  and  all  the  while, 

Above,  the  overwandering  ivy  and  vine 

This  way  and  that  in  many  a  wild  festoon 

Ran  riot,  garlanding  the  gnarled  boughs 

With  bunch  and  berry  and  flower  thro'  and  thro'. 

And  this  is  the  new  thing,  with  its  one  line — 

"  And  at  their  feet  the  crocus  brake  like  fire  " — 


ii6  Tennyson 

which  is  the  centre  light  and  passion  of  the  whole, 
which  fills  the  scene,  not  only  with  golden  glory,  but 
with  the  immortal  power  of  the  gods,  before  whose  deity 
Nature  blossoms  into  worship  : 

It  was  the  deep  mid-noon  :  one  silvery  cloud 

Had  lost  his  way  between  the  piney  sides 

Of  this  long  glen.     Then  to  the  bower  they  came, 

Naked  they  came  to  the  smooth-swarded  bower, 

And  at  their  feet  the  crocus  brake  like  fire, 

Violet,  amaracus,  and  asphodel, 

Lotus  and  lilies  :  and  a  wind  arose, 

And  overhead  the  wandering  ivy  and  vine. 

This  way  and  that,  in  many  a  wild  festoon 

Ran  riot,  garlanding  the  gnarled  boughs 

With  bunch  and  berry  and  flower  thro'  and  thro*. 

Nothing  can  be  more  careful  than  the  composition  of 
this  background  for  the  goddesses.  Some  have  said 
that  it  is  a  little  too  pictorial  for  poetry  ;  but  we  will  be 
thankful  that  we  have  a  piece  of  work  of  a  kind  which 
was  then  new  in  poetry,  and  that  it  is  splendidly  done.* 

But  there  is  something  more  to  say.  In  the  original 
cast,  the  scenery  of  the  poem  was  not  fully  inwoven  with 

*  See  how  Tennyson  has  left  out  the  thoroughly  bad  line — "  They 
came — all  three — the  Olympian  goddesses  " — how  he  has  made  melo- 
dious the  halting  lines,  such  as  "  Both  white  and  blue,  with  lotetree- 
fruit  thickset "  ;  and  how  the  confusion  of  colour  and  flowers,  the 
over-description  of  the  flowers,  and  the  addition  of  the  pine-groves 
above  the  bower,  all  of  which  take  our  eyes  away  from  the  god- 
desses, are  omitted  or  reduced  to  simplicity.  Moreover  he  knew 
clearly  the  good  things  in  his  original  verses  and  did  not  touch  those 
admirable  four  last  lines.  He  may  have  had  in  his  ear  Milton's 
"  with  the  gadding  vine  o'ergrown,"  but  if  so — how  delightfully  he 
has  fulfilled  that  which  Milton  only  touched  with  a  single  adjective. 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     117 

CEnone's  mind.  It  did  not  fit  her  or  feel  with  her  as 
subtly  and  intimately  as  he  wished  ;  she  did  not  seem  to 
have  lived  with  it  in  long  association — a  thing  Tennyson 
felt  was  necessary  for  himself  if  he  were  to  describe  a 
landscape  perfectly.  Nor  were  the  mountains  or  the 
woods  or  the  gorge  in  the  first  draft  deep  enough  or 
high  enough  for  her  passion  or  for  the  fateful  meeting 
of  the  goddesses,  or  sombre  enough  for  her  misery  or 
for  the  fate  of  Troy,  which  lies  beyond  the  poem  and 
yet  is  contained  within  its  action. 

To  fulfil  and  embody  in  the  landscape  these  various 
hues  of  passion,  to  make  the  landscape  more  absolutely 
one  with  them,  Tennyson  set  himself  to  work  in  the  new 
poem,  and  he  did  it  by  adding  a  touch  here  and  a  touch 
there,  by  describing  the  landscape — a  trick  of  his  which 
he  first  used  in  Mariana — at  different  times  of  the  day 
with  a  greater  fulness  than  before,  until  at  last  we  can 
no  more  divide  OEnone  from  the  Nature  in  which  she  is 
placed  than  we  can  separate  the  soul  from  the  body  of  a 
friend.  She  is  involved  in  the  Nature  which  surrounds 
her,  and  the  Nature  in  which  she  lives  has  mixed  itself 
with  her  thought  and  her  passion.  Her  constant  cry, 
even  in  the  first  draft,  proves  this  : 

O  mother  Ida,  harken  ere  I  die ! 


This  power  of  forging  together  Nature  and  the  heart 
of  man  adds  emotion  to  the  skill  with  which  the  occa- 
sional figures  are  placed  in  the  landscape,  and  to  the 
vividness  with  which  they  are  suddenly,  almost  flamingly, 


Ii8  Tennyson 

struck  upon  the  sight.  I  need  not  quote  the  splendid 
image  of  Aphrodite  in  this  poem,  but  here  is  Paris  issu- 
ing from  the  wood  : 

Beautiful  Paris,  evil-hearted  Paris, 

Leading  a  jet-black  goat  white-horned,  white-hooved, 

Came  up  from  reedy  Simois  all  alone. 

White-breasted  like  a  star 
Fronting  the  dawn  he  moved  ;  a  leopard  skin 
Droop'd  from  his  shoulder,  but  his  sunny  hair 
Cluster'd  about  his  temples  like  a  god's  ; 
And  his  cheek  brighten'd  as  the  foam-bow  brightens 
When  the  wind  blows  the  foam. 

From  end  to  end  the  Idylls  of  the  King  is  full  of  figure- 
painting,  as  illuminated  and  illuminating  the  scene,  as 
that  of  Paris  here  on  Ida.  Another  example,  from  The 
Lady  of  Shalott,  where  Sir  Lancelot  comes  riding  down 
by  the  river  side,  is  too  well  known  to  quote.  These  are 
the  first  five  lines  of  it ; 

A  bow-shot  from  her  bower-eaves. 
He  rode  between  the  barley-sheaves ; 
The  sun  came  dazzling  thro'  the  leaves 
And  flamed  upon  the  brazen  greaves 
Of  bold  Sir  Lancelot. 

The  rest  of  it  is  equally  brilliant.  Horse  and  man, 
sunlight  and  scenery,  gleaming  river  and  glancing  ar- 
mour— how  they  fit  together,  into  what  unity  of  impres- 
sion they  are  knit  !  The  verse  flashes  and  scintillates 
like  the  armour,  like  the  eyes  of  Lancelot  in  the  sun- 
light. The  passage  is  perhaps  almost  over-sparkled,  and 
it  might  be  chastened  a  little,  shortened  by  at  least  one 
verse,  and  improved  ;  but  it  is  a  wonderful  piece  of  gold 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     119 

and  jewel-work,  and  only  Milton  can  excel  it  in  its  own 
sphere.  We  might  compare  it  with  the  description  of 
Raphael  and  his  dress  in  Paradise  Lost.  Of  course  the 
Miltonic  work  is  the  more  dignified,  for  the  figure  is  that 
of  the  Angel  of  the  Earth.  Milton's  verse  too  is  stately 
— blank  verse,  not  the  jingling  trot  of  the  light  metre 
Tennyson  chose  for  his  lightly  imagined  subject — but 
the  colour,  the  clearness,  the  presentation  of  the  dress 
and  the  figure,  the  many-hued  sculpture,  and  the  glori- 
ous gleaming  of  Milton's  Archangel,  make  clear  to  us  on 
what  master  Tennyson,  even  in  these  pictorial  matters, 
now  modelled  his  technical  work. 

Such,  to  return  from  this  excursion  on  figure-drawing, 
is  the  invented  landscape  in  CEnone.  But  fine  landscape 
and  fine  figure-drawing  are  not  enough  to  make  a  fine 
poem.  Human  interest,  human  passion,  must  be  greater 
than  Nature,  and  dominate  the  subject.  Indeed,  all  this 
lovely  scenery  is  nothing  in  comparison  with  the  sorrow 
and  love  of  Ginone,  recalling  her  lost  love  in  the  places 
where  once  she  lived  in  joy.  This  is  the  main  humanity 
of  the  poem.  But  there  is  more.  Her  common  sorrow 
is  lifted  almost  into  the  proportions  of  Greek  tragedy  by 
its  cause  and  by  its  results.  It  is  caused  by  a  quarrel  in 
Olympus,  and  the  mountain  nymph  is  sacrificed  without 
a  thought  to  the  vanity  of  the  careless  gods.  That  is  an 
ever-recurring  tragedy  in  human  history.  Moreover,  the 
personal  tragedy  deepens  when  we  see  the  fateful  dread 
in  (Enone's  heart  that  she  will  far  away  in  time  hold  her 
lover's  life  in  her  hands,  and  refuse  to   give  it  back  to 


I20  Tennyson 

him — a  fatality  that  Tennyson  treated  before  he  died. 
And  secondly,  CEnone's  sorrow  is  lifted  into  dignity  by 
the  vast  results  which  flowed  from  its  cause.  Behind  it 
were  the  mighty  fates  of  Troy,  the  ten  years'  battle,  the 
anger  of  Achilles,  the  wanderings  of  Ulysses,  the  tragedy 
of  Agamemnon,  the  founding  of  Rome,  and  the  three 
great  epics  of  the  ancient  world. 

This  was  then  a  subject  well  chosen,  holding  in  it 
mighty  human  thoughts  and  destinies,  and  these  are  liv- 
ing in  the  poem.  But  there  is  something  more  to  say. 
Tennyson,  in  the  way  I  have  already  explained,  makes 
all  these  classic  poems  fit  in  with  modern  times  and  in- 
struct the  conscience  or  enhance  the  aspiration  of  those 
who  read  his  work.  Wordsworth  did  this  in  his  Lao- 
damia  and  Dion.  Keats  did  not  do  it,  Greek  as  were  his 
subjects.  He  loved  their  beauty,  not  their  lessons  to 
mankind.  Tennyson  does  give  what  Wordsworth  does 
not — their  sensuous  beauty — but  he  also  gives  their  uni- 
versal lesson.  And  in  CEnone  he  lays  down  that  which 
in  all  his  poetry  and  in  his  character  also  was  one  of  the 
first  of  thoughts  to  him,  not  only  the  foundation  of  life, 
and  government,  of  true  power,  and,  in  the  end,  of 
beauty,  but  also  the  root  of  the  glory  and  strength  of 
England  as  he  wished  her  to  be.  This  is  held  in  the 
speech  of  Pallas,  and  is  the  centre  of  the  poem  : 

Self-reverence,  self-knowledge,  self-control. 
These  three  alone  lead  life  to  sovereign  power. 
Yet  not  for  power  (power  of  herself 
Would  come  uncall'd  for)  but  to  live  by  law, 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     121 

Acting  the  law  we  live  by  without  fear  ; 
And,  because  right  is  right,  to  follow  right 
Were  wisdom  in  the  scorn  of  consequence. 

I  woo  thee  not  with  gifts. 
Sequel  of  guerdon  could  not  alter  me 
To  fairer.     Judge  thou  me  by  what  I  am. 
So  shalt  thou  find  me  fairest. 

Oh,  rest  thee  sure 
That  I  shall  love  thee  well  and  cleave  to  thee, 
So  that  my  vigour,  wedded  to  thy  blood. 
Shall  strike  within  thy  pulses,  like  a  god's, 
To  push  thee  forward  thro'  a  life  of  shocks. 
Dangers,  and  deeds,  until  endurance  grow 
Sinew'd  with  action,  and  the  full-grown  will. 
Circled  thro'  all  experiences,  pure  law, 
Commeasure  perfect  freedom. 

In  these  thoughts  we  pierce  down  to  one  of  the  roots 
of  Tennyson.  On  those  thoughts  he  built  his  patriotic 
poetry.  In  order  to  enhance  those  thoughts,  he  built  as 
their  contrast  and  opposite  the  character  of  the  hero  in 
the  two  Locksley  Halls.  On  those  lines  he  draws  the 
character  of  King  Arthur.  On  those  lines,  in  a  hundred 
poems,  he  lays  down  what  he  considers  to  be  the  great- 
ness of  England,  the  greatness  of  mankind.  Athena  in 
the  heart,  to  use  Ruskin's  phrase,  is  a  universal  need  ; 
and  the  expression  of  this  thought  of  Tennyson's  makes 
(Enone  not  only  a  classic  but  a  modern  poem. 

In  The  Lotos-Eaters  the  landscape  is  also  invented. 
There  is  no  description  in  the  Odyssey  of  the  land  of 
"  the  Lotos-eaters,  who  eat  a  flowery  food."  It  is  only 
said  that  "  whoso  ate  the  honey-sweet  fruit  of  the  lotos 
had  no  desire   to  bring   tidings  to  the  ship,  or  to  come 


122  Tennyson 

back  to  it,  but  chose  to  dwell  among  the  lotos-eating 
folk,  and,  forgetful  of  returning,  fed  upon  the  lotos." 
This  is  the  source  of  Tennyson's  poem.  But  in  a 
Nature-loving  world  like  ours  and  midst  of  that  modern 
poetic  temper  which  makes  Nature  reflect  humanity,  so 
simple  a  treatment  is  not  enough  for  Tennyson.  He 
drives  the  bark  of  Ulysses  into  a  shallow  bay  opening  up 
shoreward  into  a  deep  valley  bordered  with  cliffs,  down 
whose  sides  thin  streams  of  silken  mist  are  falling,  and 
at  the  head  of  the  valley  three  snow-crowned  mountain- 
peaks  are  rosy  in  the  sunset.  The  vale  is  filled  with  the 
soft  murmur  of  a  river  which  glides  at  last  through  the 
yellow  sand  of  the  seashore  into  the  sea  over  which  the 
sun  is  setting.  This  is  his  landscape,  and  everywhere 
below  the  pines,  in  every  creek  and  alley,  on  every  lawn, 
beside  every  stream,  the  lotos  blooms  and  sheds  its 
yellow  dust  upon  the  weary  wind. 

But  the  landscape  itself  is  not  enough.  It  must 
be  put  into  harmony  with  the  soft  oblivion  which  the 
lotos  brings,  with  the  rest  and  slumber  of  life  dreaming 
that  it  dreams.  So  the  air  is  languid,  and  the  moon  has 
completed  its  waxing  and  is  full-faced  ;  and  the  streams 
fall  in  slow-dropping  veils  of  thinnest  lawn,  and  their 
sheets  of  foam  are  slumbrous,  and  the  snow  on  the 
rosy  peaks  is  very  old,  and  the  amber  light  dreams,  and 
the  waves  curve  tenderly  upon  the  land,  and  the  leaf 
and  the  apple  on  the  trees  round  to  fulness  and  fall,  full 
ripe,  and  all  the  winds  and  sounds  are  low.  Nature, 
like  the  indwellers  of  the  land,  has  eaten  of  the  indolent 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     123 

forgetfulness  of  the  flower.  This  is  the  poet's  way,  and 
he  had  his  examples  of  this  kind  of  work  in  Spenser's 
Cave  of  Sleep  and  in  Thomson's  Castle  of  Indolence  ;  but 
I  think  he  has  excelled  them  both. 

As  to  the  main  thought  of  the  poem,  it  is,  like  that 
of  these  classical  poems  in  general,  of  great  simplicity, 
and  its  feeling  felt  at  all  times  of  human  life.  "  Why 
should  we  only  toil,  the  roof  and  crown  of  things  ? 
Death  is  the  end  of  life^  why  then  should  life  be 
labour  ? 

Let  us  alone.     What  pleasure  can  we  have 
To  war  with  evil  ?     Is  there  any  peace 
In  ever  climbing  up  the  climbing  wave? 

Enough  of  action,  of  trouble  on  trouble,  pain  on  pain. 
No  more  of  pursuit,  of  mending  what  is  broken,  of  the 
strife  of  love.     To  dream,  to  sleep  : 

Oh  rest  ye,  brother  mariners,  we  will  not  wander  more." 

The  first  sketch  of  this  thought  was  in  the  Sea-Fairies 
of  1830,  and  a  lightly  treated  thing  it  was.  Then  that 
was  made  into  The  Lotos- Eaters  of  1833,  the  first  part 
of  which  is  kept  in  the  recast  of  the  poem  of  1842.  But 
in  the  latter  part,  a  great  and  vital  change  was  made. 
First,  the  passage. 

Dear  is  the  memory  of  our  wedded  lives,  etc., 

was  added,  and  it  is  a  passage  which  doubles  the  human 
interest  of  the  poem  ;  and,  secondly,  instead  of  the 
jingling,  unintellectual,  merely    fanciful  ending  of  the 


124  Tennyson 

poem  of  1833,  every  image  of  which  wanders  hither 
and  thither  without  clear  purpose  and  weakens  the 
impression  of  the  previous  part,  the  poem  thus  closing 
in  a  feeble  anti-climax,  we  have  the  weighty,  solemn, 
thoughtful,  classic  close,  embodying  the  Epicurean  con- 
ception of  the  gods,  bringing  all  Olympus  down  into 
harmony  with  the  indifferent  dreaming  of  the  Lotos- 
eaters,  but  leaving  in  our  minds  the  sense  of  a 
dreadful  woe  tending  on  those  that  dream  ;  for  what  the 
gods  do  with  impunity,  man  may  not  do.  Yet,  even  the 
Lotos-eating  Gods  inevitable  fate  awaits. 

This  is  the  work  of  a  great  artist,  and  in  this  steady 
improvement  of  his  poems  Tennyson  stands  almost 
alone.  Other  poets,  Wordsworth,  Shelley,  Keats,  did  not 
recast  their  poems  in  this  wholesale  fashion,  and  the 
additions  or  changes  which  they  made  were  by  no 
means  always  improvements.  Tennyson,  working  with 
his  clear  sense  of  what  was  artistic,  and  with  the  stately 
steadiness  which  belonged  to  his  character,  not  only  im- 
proved but  doubled  the  value  of  the  poems  he  altered.* 
Many  persons  would  like  another  kind  of  artist — one  who 
does  at  a  rush  what  he  desires  to  do,  or  one  who  could 


*  It  would  be  an  excellent  thing  if  Lord  Tennyson  would  permit 
Messrs.  Macmillan  to  reprint  the  volumes  of  1830  and  1833.  In 
most  cases  it  is  a  mistake  to  issue  the  earliest  forms  of  a  great  poet's 
works — forms  which  he  has  rejected  as  inadequate.  But  in  this  case 
it  would  not  be  a  mistake.  It  would  be  a  lesson  to  all  artists,  and 
still  more  to  all  critics,  to  study  the  noble  changes  Tennyson  here 
made  ;  and  it  would  not  diminish,  but  greatly  enhance,  our  admira- 
tion of  his  art  and  character. 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     125 

not  go  back  on  what  he  had  done,  because  new  things 
occur  to  him  incessantly  ;  and  this  our  Hking  is  a  matter 
of  temperament.  But  Tennyson  was  built  in  another 
fashion.  What  he  did  was  wholly  in  harmony  with  the 
man,  and  our  business  is  not  to  wish  the  artist  different, 
but  to  find  out  what  he  is,  and  to  love  him  within  the 
necessary  limits  of  his  sphere.  In  that  way  we  get  his 
good,   and  are  not  troubled  by  his  weaknesses. 

The  last  of  the  classical  poems  in  the  volume  of  1842 
is,  from  contemplation's  point  of  view,  the  best.  This 
is  the  Ulysses.  The  scene  is  set  on  the  shore  of  Ithaca, 
at  the  port.  The  time  is  evening.  The  moon  is  rising 
and  the  sea  is  gloomed  by  the  shadows  of  the  coming 
night.  There  is  no  description  of  the  landscape,  but 
enough  is  given  to  make  us  feel  the  time  and  place. 
Yet  when  Tennyson  touches  Nature  in  this  poem  it  is 
done  with  even  more  mastery  than  in  CE?ione  ;  with  ex- 
traordinary brevity  and  force.  A  whole  world  of  ocean 
weather  and  of  sea  experience  is  in  the  last  two  lines  of 
this  : 

All  times  I  have  enjoy'd 

Greatly,  have  suffer'd  greatly,  both  with  those 

That  loved  me,  and  alone  :  on  shore,  and  when 

Thro'  scudding  drifts  the  rainy  Hyades 

Vext  the  dim  sea  : 

And  I  quote  the  three  lines  which  follow,  not  only 
because  the  Nature  in  them  strikes  the  note  of  that  pro- 
found melancholy  which  lay  underneath  the  intense  and 
hopeless  curiosity  of  the  Renaissance— the  same  kind  of 


126  Tennyson 

curiosity  which  Ulysses  feels  in  this  poem — but  also 
because  the  second  line  is  one  of  Tennyson's  finest 
examples  of  sound  echoing  the  sense  : 

The  lights  begin  to  twinkle  from  the  rocks  : 

The  long  day  wanes  :  the  slow  moon  climbs  ;  the  deep 

Moans  round  with  many  voices. 

But  the  dominant  interest  here,  more  than  in  CEnone 
and  The  Lotos-Eaters,  is  the  human  interest — the  soul 
that  cannot  rest,  whom  the  unknown  always  allures  to 
action — the  image  of  the  exact  opposite  of  the  temper 
of  mind  of  the  Lotos-eaters. 

Yet  all  experience  is  an  arch  wherethro' 

Gleams  that  imtravell'd  world,  whose  margin  fades 

For  ever  and  for  ever  when  I  move. 

How  dull  it  is  to  pause,  to  make  an  end, 

To  rust  unburnish'd,  not  to  shine  in  use  ! 

As  tho'  to  breathe  were  life.     Life  piled  on  life 

Were  all  too  little, — and  of  one  to  me 

Little  remains  :  but  every  hour  is  saved 

From  that  eternal  silence,  something  more, 

A  bringer  of  new  things  ;  and  vile  it  were 

For  some  three  suns  to  store  and  hoard  myself. 

And  this  gray  spirit  yearning  in  desire 

To  follow  knowledge  like  a  sinking  star, 

Beyond  the  utmost  bound  of  human  thought. 

There  never  was  a  better  description  of  the  temper 
of  the  higher  spirits  of  the  Renaissance  in  Italy.  We 
listen  to  the  very  soul  of  Leonardo  da  Vinci. 

This  too  is  Tennyson,  I  have  heard  it  said  that,  in 
this  poem,  he  drew  the  portrait  of  his  own  mind.  I  can 
well  believe  it,  and  it  is  a  noble  temper  with  which  to 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     127 

step  into  the  fuller  manhood  of  middle  life.  Indeed,  he 
never  thought  it  too  late  to  seek  in  his  own  art  a  newer 
world.  Even  at  eighty  years  he  took  new  subjects  and 
tried  new  ways  in  poetry.  The  cry  of  his  Ulysses  was 
the  cry  of  his  old  age  : 

Tho*  much  is  taken,  much  abides  :  and  tho' 

We  are  not  now  that  strength  which  in  old  days 

Moved  eartli  and  heaven  ;  that  which  we  are,  we  are  : 

One  equal  temper  of  heroic  hearts. 

Made  weak  by  time  and  fate,  but  strong  in  will 

To  strive,  to  seek,  to  find,  and  not  to  yield. 

Thus  he  returned  to  the  Greek,  as  Keats  had  done  ; 
but  not  as  Keats,  only  for  the  sake  of  the  beauty  of 
Greece,  but  also  for  the  sake  of  the  ethic  power  of  her 
stories  ;  not  like  Keats,  that  he  might  find  in  ancient 
times  a  refuge  from  the  baseness  of  the  present,  but 
that  he  might  bring  thoughts  out  of  the  past  to  rejoice 
and  illuminate  the  present.  The  speech  of  Pallas  to 
Paris  is  spoken  to  England  :  the  song  of  the  Lotos- 
eater  is  a  warning  to  the  drifters  and  dreamers  of  our 
world  ;  in  the  thoughts  of  Ulysses  is  held  the  power  and 
the  glory  of  England.  Nevertheless,  though  these  poems 
have  an  ethical  direction,  it  is  subordinate  to  their  first 
direction,  which  is  to  represent  the  beauty  in  their  sub- 
jects. No  one  who  has  any  sense  of  art  will  presume  to 
accuse  them  of  being  didactic  rather  than  artistic. 

It  was,  however,  not  only  in  Greek  story  that  in  these 
years  he  sought  his  subjects.  He  turned  to  that  great 
romantic  cycle   which  has  for  eight   centuries  at  least 


128  Tennyson 

kindled  the  imagination  of  England  and  been  the  dar- 
ling of  her  poets.  He  turned  to  the  tale  of  Arthur  and 
his  knights. 

It  may  be  that  his  study  of  Milton,  which  now  appears 
so  clearly  in  his  blank  verse,  had  made  him  think,  quite 
early  in  life,  of  an  Arthurian  epic,  which,  if  Milton 
swerved  from,  he  might  himself  fulfil  ;  but  it  is  proba- 
ble that  this  interest  was  at  first  only  a  slight  and  glan- 
cing interest,  such  as  every  poetic  person  takes  in  the  tale 
with  all  its  Celtic  allurement.  The  small  fragment  of 
Launcelot  and  Guinevere  is  only  a  charming  piece  of  glit- 
tering grace.  The  Lady  of  Shalott  is"  a  pleasant  piece 
of  play  with  his  readers — simplicity  in  a  mask  of  mysti- 
cism. Sir  Galahad  is  graver,  but  still  only  an  occasional 
piece,  such  as  a  poet  makes  "  to  try  his  hand." 

Of  these  The  Lady  of  Shalott  is  the  best,  as  it  is  in- 
tended to  be.  No  poem  is  more  brilliant  in  words,  but 
it  does  not  attempt  so  much  as  Sir  Galahad  to  make  the 
sound  of  the  verse  describe  the  thing.  It  has  no  lines 
so  imitative  as 

The  shattering  trumpet  shrilleth  high, 

but  it  has  that  amazing  piece  of  diamond  description 
which  I  have  already  quoted.  As  to  its  meaning,  folk 
have  exhausted  themselves  to  find  it,  and  fruitlessly.  It 
was  never  intended  to  have  any  special  meaning.  Ten- 
nyson was  playing  with  his  own  imagination  when  he 
wrote  it.  He  saw  the  island  and  the  girl  in  the  tower,  and 
then  the  loom  and  web  and  mirror  crept  into  the  tower  ; 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     129 

and  then  he  saw  the  pictures  in  the  mirror,  and  was 
pleased  to  describe  them  ;  and  then  he  thought  of  the 
curse,  and  then  of  Lancelot,  and  then  of  death.  The 
poem  grew  without  intention  like  a  flower  which  had  not 
been  on  earth  before.  Yet  out  of  all  the  fancy  arose  one 
touch  of  reality.  What  a  secluded  maid  sees  are  but 
pictures,  but  the  hour  comes  when  she  says,  "  I  am  half 
sick  of  shadows."  To  know  that  the  pictures  of  the 
mind  are  shadows  is  to  be  wild  to  seek  reality.  Then  if 
love  come,  hopeless  love,  all  the  world  of  mere  phan- 
tasy breaks  up,  and  the  actual  kills  : 

Out  flew  the  web  and  floated  wide  ; 
The  mirror  crack'd  from  side  to  side ; 
"  The  curse  come  upon  me,"  cried 
The  Lady  of  Shalott. 

If  there  be  meaning  at  all  in  this  piece  of  gossamer 
fancy,  that  is  it,  and,  like  all  Tennyson's  meanings,  it  is 
as  simple  as  the  day. 

As  to  the  Sir  Galahad,  the  true  romantic  note  which, 
in  the  creation  of  Galahad,  is  made  to  thrill  more  high 
and  clear  by  the  addition  of  the  keener  note  of  vir- 
ginity, fills  that  poem.  The  conception  of  the  total 
conquest  of  the  evil  of  matter,  of  the  total  indifference 
to  all  appetite  and  sense,  so  that  life  on  earth  was 
lived  in  a  supersensuous  realm  wherein  all  things  and 
beings  thought  to  be  invisible  were  visible — was  a  con- 
ception of  pure  art,  I  might  even  say  of  pure  romance. 
In  that  conception  religious  passion  was  added  to  ro- 
mance, and   asceticism   clothed   with   spiritual   beauty. 


130  Tennyson 

Art,  therefore,  found  in  it  one  of  its  natural  subjects. 
Tennyson,  even  more  than  in  the  Galahad  of  the  Idylls 
of  the  King,  seized  in  this  poem  the  beauty  of  celestial 
purity,  and  of  the  supernatural  world  it  opened  to  his 
virgin  knight.  No  one  can  speak  too  highly  of  verses 
like  that  beginning  : 

When  down  the  stormy  crescent  goes, 

or  the  two  that  follow  it.  It  is  not  only  Galahad  who 
is  represented  in  them  as  above  Nature,  but  it  is  that 
Nature  herself,  while  she  is  seen  and  heard,  is  spirit- 
ualised. In  their  high-ringing  clang  we  feel  the  world 
which  is  the  substance  of  the  shadow-world  we  see. 

When  we  come  to  the  Moric  d' Arthur,  we  come  to 
that  which  is  more  serious  than  these  tentative  flights 
over  a  great  subject.  We  come  to  the  love  of  a  lifetime. 
The  poem  itself  belongs  to  the  Idylls  of  the  Kvig,  and  I 
shall  speak  of  it  in  its  place.  But  the  prologue  and 
epilogue  belong  to  the  history  of  1842,  and  to  the  whole 
subject  of  this  chapter.  The  prologue,  with  its  types 
of  modern  social  life,  the  parson,  the  poet,  and  the  man 
of  the  day — each  giving  and  taking  as  in  a  dinner- 
conversation — each  in  their  way  maintaining  that  poetry 
must  sit  close  to  the  life  of  the  present — shows  how  vivid 
modern  society  was  now  to  Tennyson.  "  A  truth  looks 
freshest  in  the  fashion  of  the  day."  The  phrase  em- 
bodies his  method  in  these  poems.  Nor  must  we  miss 
his  description  of  himself.  No  one  who  has  ever  heard 
him  read  his  own  poetry  can  mistake  the  portrait  : 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     131 

.     And  the  poet,  little  urged, 
But  with  some  prelude  of  disparagement, 
Read,  mouthing  out  his  hollow  oes  and  aes, 
Deep-chested  music. 

It  could  not  be  more  truly  done. 

As  to  the  epilogue,  it  illustrates  all  I  have  been  saying 
about  Tennyson's  method  with  subjects  drawn  from 
Greek  or  romantic  times.  He  filled  and  sustained  those 
subjects  with  thoughts  which  were  as  modern  as  they 
were  ancient.  While  he  placed  his  readers  in  Camelot, 
Ithaca,  or  Ida,  he  made  them  feel  also  that  they  were 
standing  in  London,  Oxford,  or  an  English  woodland. 
When  the  Morte  d" Arthur  is  finished,  the  hearer  of  it 
sits  rapt.  There  were  "  modern  touches  here  and  there," 
he  says,  and  when  he  sleeps,  he  dreams  of 

King  Arthur,  like  a  modern  gentleman 
Of  stateliest  port  ;  and  all  the  people  cried, 
"  Arthur  is  come  again  ;  he  cannot  die." 
Then  those  that  stood  upon  the  hills  behind 
Repeated — "  Come  again,  and  thrice  as  fair"  ; 
And,  further  inland,  voices  echoed — "Come 
With  all  good  things,  and  war  shall  be  no  more." 

The  old  tale,  thus  modernised  in  an  epilogue,  does  not 
lose  its  dignity  ;  for  now  the  recoming  of  Arthur  is  the 
recoming  of  Christ  in  a  wider  and  fairer  Christianity. 
We  feel  here  how  the  new  movement  of  religion  and 
theology  had  sent  its  full  and  exciting  wave  into  Tenny- 
son. Arthur's  death  in  the  battle  and  the  mist  is  the 
death  of  a  form  of  Christianity  which,  exhausted,  died 
in  doubt  and  darkness.     His  advent  as  a  modern  gentle- 


132  Tennyson 

man  is  the  coming  of  a  brighter  and  more  loving  Christ 

into   the   hearts   of   men.     For   so    ends   the    epilogue. 

When   the    voices   cry,    "  Come    again,   with   all    good 

things," 

At  this  a  hundred  bells  began  to  peal, 

That  with  the  sound  I  woke,  and  heard  indeed 

The  clear  church-bells  ring  in  the  Christmas-mom. 

This  inoculation  of  ancient  stories  with  modern 
thought,  while  the  tales  themselves  were  kept  either 
classic  or  romantic,  received  its  fullest  development  in 
the  Idylls  of  the  King.  But  it  was  less  and  less  used  in 
the  classic  poems  written  after  1842.  They  still  retained 
the  use  of  one  simple  thought  around  which  each  poem 
gathered  itself,  but  this  thought  ceased  to  be  so  plainly 
modernised  as  before.  Tennyson  did  not  bring  Tithonus 
or  Lucretius  or  Tiresias  into  England.  He  went  to 
them  and  he  stayed  with  their  personality  and  in  their 
time.  This  change  shows,  I  think,  that  as  his  years 
went  by  he  felt  that,  having  done  so  much  for  modem 
life,  he  was  licensed  to  live  in  these  poems,  if  he  liked, 
wholly  among  the  ancients.  It  seems  fitting  to  treat  of 
them  in  this  chapter,  even  though  I  transgress  the  chro- 
nological order  in  which  I  generally  speak  of  his  poetry. 

So  many  writers  have  written  on  the  knowledge  of 
classic  thought  displayed  in  these  poems  and  on  their 
nearness  to  classic  feeling,  that  I  need  not  dwell  upon 
these  matters.  It  has  been  a  favourite  subject  of  re- 
views. Many  also  have  drawn  attention  to  Tennyson's 
frequent  use  of  phrases  from  the  classic   writers,   and 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842      133 

sometimes  in  such  a  way  as  to  suggest  that  he  was  a 
plagiarist.  This  is  an  absurd  suggestion.  He  had  a  per- 
fect right  to  transfer  to  his  poems  expressions  and  even 
lines  from  the  classic  poets,  provided  he  gave  them  a 
new  setting,  or  a  novel  phrasing,  in  his  translation.  All 
the  great  poets  have  done  this  when  their  subject  was 
classical,  or  their  poem  heroic.  Virgil  did  it,  Dante  did 
it  ;  so  did  Spenser,  Tasso,  Ariosto,  Racine,  Corneille, 
and  Milton  ;  and  it  did  not  occur  to  their  contempo- 
raries to  accuse  them  of  borrowing  without  acknowledg- 
ment. There  was  no  acknowledgment  needed.  The 
poets  thought  that  every  one  who  read  their  classic 
phrases  would  know  whence  they  came,  and  would  un- 
derstand that  they  did  not  insert  their  original  in  a  note, 
just  because  to  do  so  would  insult  the  culture  of  their 
readers,  I  do  not  suppose  it  occurred  to  Tennyson  to 
explain  that  something  in  his  Ulysses  was  owed  to  Dante, 
or  that  "  Softer  than  sleep,"  or 

This  way  and  that  dividing  the  swift  mind, 

and  a  hundred  other  lines  and  phrases,  were  from  Virgil 
or  Homer,  Sophocles  or  Pindar,  Catullus  or  Horace. 
He  thought  that  every  one  would  know  these  things,  and 
he  used  them  as  we  use,  in  Avriting,  phrases  from  the 
Bible  or  Shakespeare  without  taking  the  trouble  of  put- 
ting them  in  inverted  commas.  Moreover,  he  may  have 
thought  that  the  world  would  be  pleased  to  find  lovely 
phrases  which  were  the  common  property  of  all  writers 
beautifully  translated  and  delightfully  reset.     Of  all  the 


134  Tennyson 

half-suggested  accusations  made  against  Tennyson,  this 
of  plagiarism  from  the  classic  poets  is,  under  the  cir- 
cumstances, the  most  futile  and  the  most  invidious. 

Among  these  later  classic  poems,  the  first,  in  order  of 
date,  is  Tithonus.  I  suppose  from  internal  evidence 
that  this  poem,  published  in  i860,  was  written  not  very 
long  after  the  Ulysses.  It  has  the  same  atmosphere  of 
youthful  feeling  and  the  same  technical  maturity.  It 
seems  even  finer  than  the  Ulysses  as  a  piece  of  art.  In- 
deed, nothing  of  its  kind  approaches  it  in  modern  poetry, 
nor  anything  in  which  the  imagination  of  Tennyson  is  at 
work  with  greater  creativeness,  insight,  pathetic  power, 
passion,  noble  sensuousness  and  simplicity.  The  sub- 
ject was  also  one  of  extraordinary  difficulty.  It  was 
easy,  in  comparison,  for  Tennyson  to  write  the  Ulysses. 
That  poem  was  built  out  of  his  own  character,  and  em- 
bodied a  type  with  which  he  had  the  strongest  sympathy. 
But  when  he  wrote  of  Tithonus  he  was  obliged  to  get  out 
of  himself  altogether,  or,  at  least,  to  use  up  for  his  work 
not  a  constant,  but  a  temporary  attitude  of  his  soul. 
Moreover,  the  scene  was  laid  in  a  dim,  unknown  country, 
on  the  outskirts  of  the  heaven  and  the  earth,  below  the 
visible,  where  there  was  no  landsc'ape.  This  had  to  be 
realised,  and  it  is  done  with  full  imagination,  not  only  in 
the  lines  which  describe  the  quiet  limit  of  the  world — 

The  ever-silent  spaces  of  the  East, 
Far-folded  mists,  and  gleaming  halls  of  mom, 

but  also  in  the  impression  made  by  the  whole  of  the 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842      135 

poem.  Its  world  is  not  a  world  of  night  or  day,  but  of 
the  transitory  dawn.  Aurora  herself  seems  to  die  at 
sunrise,  and  the  description  of  her  wakening — the  glim- 
mer on  her  brow,  her  sweet  eyes  slowly  brightening 
before  they  blind  the  stars,  her  wild  team  shaking  the 
darkness  from  their  loosened  manes,  and  her  departure, 
weeping  for  her  chilly  lover — is  of  the  very  finest 
quality.  Yet,  remote  as  the  place  is  from  humanity, 
Tennyson  has  filled  his  poem  with  pathetic  emotion. 
Immortal  age  tied  to  immortal  youth,  immortal  youth 
pained  for  immortal  age  ;  the  gift  love  gave  of  immor- 
tality the  curse  of  him  to  whom  it  was  given,  the 
memory,  in  decay,  of  youth  and  of  love  once  passionate, 
the  dreadful  inability  to  love,  the  dreadful  inability  to 
die — all  is  subtly,  beautifully,  and  firmly  realised.  The 
very  movement  of  the  blank  verse  is  tender  with  the 
irreparable  woe  of  Tithonus. 

The  main  thought  of  the  poem  has  often  been  used. 
Immortality  for  men,  without  youth,  and  with  its  mem- 
ories, is  an  accursed  gift.  Swift  exposed  the  horror 
of  it  in  his  own  savage  fashion,  lacerating  himself  and 
man  with  self-tormenting  scorn.  Tennyson  has  done  it 
with  exquisite  tenderness  for  man  ;  and  made  the  victim 
think  gently  of  his  own  race,  and  truly  of  their  fate  : 

Why  should  a  man  desire  in  any  way 
To  vary  from  the  kindly  race  of  men — 
Of  happy  men  that  have  the  power  to  die  ? 

Nor  does  he  forget  to  touch  the  story  with  one  of  those 


136  Tennyson 

ancient  thoughts  which  in  all  ages  have  expressed  part 
of  the  tragic  of  our  destiny  : 

The  gods  themselves  cannot  recall  their  gifts. 

The  next  of  these  classic  poems  is  Lucretius.  It  is 
Roman,  not  Greek,  and  it  bears  the  impress  of  the 
Roman  race.  In  Tennyson's  Greek  poems,  the  Greek's 
grave  beauty  shines  through  the  modern  thought, 
through  the  modern  description  of  Nature.  Even  in 
speeches  like  those  of  Athena  and  of  Ulysses,  beauty 
sits  hand  in  hand  with  the  experience  of  life.  But  in 
Lucretius,  stern,  robust,  rigid  duty  to  self-chosen,  self- 
approved  law  is  first  ;  the  sense  of  the  beautiful  as  a 
part  of  life  does  not  appear  in  the  poem,  Lucretius 
has  no  religion  save  that  of  acceptance  of  Nature,  but 
to  that  he  is  faithful.  He  has  no  duty  to  the  gods,  but 
he  has  duty  to  his  own  philosophic  honour.  He  dies 
rather  than  be  mastered  by  lustful  visions  which  a 
Greek,  even  in  the  noble  time  when  beauty  meant  pure 
harmony,  would  have  gone  through,  smiled  at,  and  for- 
gotten. 

The  philosophy  also  is  a  Greek  philosophy,  but 
Lucretius  has  made  it  Roman  in  temper  ;  and  one  of 
the  noble  excellences  of  this  poem  is  that  Tennyson 
has  never  deviated  in  a  single  word  from  the  Roman 
basis  of  the  soul.  Moreover,  it  takes  a  great  poet  to 
assimilate,  as  Tennyson  has  done,  the  essence  of  Lucre- 
tius as  a  thinker  and  a  poet  in  the  space  of  about  three 
hundred  lines,  and  to  combine  this  with  the  representa- 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     137 

tion  of  a  man  in  an  hour  of  doom  and  madness,  such 
as  an  inferior  poet,  overloading  it  with  frenzied  orna- 
ment, would  have  made  intemperate.  Tennyson's 
masterly  reticence,  rigid  restraint  only  to  the  absolutely 
necessary,  are  supreme  in  this  poem.  Only  one  passage, 
that  about  the  breasts  of  Helen  and  the  sword,  seems  to 
me  awkward  in  conception. 

The  introduction  is  a  little  masterpiece  of  statement. 
In  the  rest  of  the  poem,  independent  of  the  superb 
setting  forth  the  Epicurean  philosophy  as  grasped  and 
dignified  by  Lucretius,  two  things  belonging  to  the  con- 
duct of  the  subject  are  remarkable.  First,  Tennyson 
has  seized  on  the  spasmodic  action  of  a  poison  to  enable 
him  to  represent  Lucretius  as  having  lucid  intervals.  A 
lesser  artist  would  have  kept  him  always  in  insanity. 
But  Lucretius,  whom  the  poet  wishes  us  to  respect 
while  we  pity  him,  is  for  the  most  part  sane.  The  in- 
fluence of  the  philtre  comes  on  him  only  in  recurring 
attacks,  and  between  the  attacks  his  mind  is  clear. 
Even  his  moral  power,  that  is,  his  truth  to  his  own  nature, 
maintains  its  mastery.  Not  for  an  instant  does  Tenny- 
son's Lucretius  ever  truly  think  that  he  is  the  same 
person  as  the  man  who  sees  the  visions  of  lust.  Not 
for  a  moment  does  he  confuse  his  own  Alma  Venus,  the 
ambrosial,  warm  and  generative  power  in  Nature,  with 
the  Cyprian  goddess  of  desire  whose  dreams  invade  his 
soul.  Lucretius  is,  in  more  than  half  this  poem,  the 
clear  thinker,  the  noble  poet,  and  the  lover  of  passion- 
less tranquillity  who  abhors  the  storm  within  him. 


138"  Tennyson 

Secondly,  Tennyson  invents,  with  the  greatest  skill,  a 
storm  in  the  night  to  illustrate  the  tempest  in  the  soul 
of  Lucretius,  and  at  the  same  time  to  supply  him  with 
a  ground  for  speaking  of  his  Nature-philosophy.  The 
storm  suggests  the  dream  of  the  flaring  atom  streams, 

Ruining  along  the  illimitable  inane — 

a  line  that  Milton  might  have  praised.     The  returning 

calm  of  the    morning   suggests  the    description  of  the 

eternal  tranquillity  of  the  gods  and  their  dwelling-place, 

and  to  Lucretius,  the  hope  that  he  may  win  back  his  own 

calm — 

Seeing  with  how  great  ease  Nature  can  smile, 
Balmier  and  nobler  from  her  bath  of  storm. 
At  random  ravage. 

These  are  the  methods  of  a  great  artist ;  but  how  the 
whole  poem  is  wrought,  how  nobly  the  character  of 
Lucretius  emerges  line  after  line,  with  what  poetic 
strength  and  sculpturing  power  his  masculine  passion 
clears  its  way  to  death  till  the  brief  close  shuts  up  the 
tragedy,  is  for  every  reader  to  grasp  as  he  has  capacity. 

Tiresias^  though  published  in  1885,  is  a  much  earlier 
poem,  perhaps  of  the  same  period  as  Lucretius.  I  class 
it  here,  because  the  subject,  except  in  the  universal 
thought  of  sacrifice  of  life  for  the  good  of  the  State,  is 
not  modernised  at  all.  The  lines  about  the  gods  being 
slower  to  forgive  than  human  kings,  and  those  describing 
the  yearning  of  Tiresias, 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     139 

For  larger  glimpses  of  that  more  than  man 

Which  rolls  the  heavens,  and  lifts,  and  lays  the  deep. 

Yet  loves  and  hates  with  mortal  hates  and  loves, 

are  fully  classical ;  and  the  way  Tiresias  thinks  and  feels 
throughout  is  not  modern,  save  perhaps  in  one  passage 
about  the  tyranny  of  all,  and  the  tyranny  of  one. 

The  poem  is  said  by  Tennyson  himself  to  "  date  many 
a  year  ago."  We  may  suppose  then  that  he  did  not 
think  it  good  enough  to  publish  alongside  of  Tithonus  or 
Ulysses  ;  and  indeed  it  falls  far  below  these  poems.  It 
repeats  itself,  and  the  conclusion  ought  not  to  be  so 
long  ;  though  Tiresias,  believed  for  the  first  time  in  his 
life,  might  well  be  excused  a  little  garrulity.  But  any 
one  may  be  glad  to  have  a  poem  which  contains  that 
dazzling  description  of  the  landscape  of  the  mountain- 
side in  the  blaze  of  the  sun,  and  the  royal  image  of 
Pallas  Athene  climbing  from  the  bath  in  the  secret 
olive  glade,  and  the  blinding  light  of  her  virgin  eyes. 
Nor  is  the  close  less  splendid  in  words  and  in  the  huge 
thought  of  the  last  line  where  the  prophet  pictures  his 
final  rest  among  the  happy  vales  that 

Wind,  clouded  with  the  grateful  incense-fume 
Of  those  who  mix  all  odour  to  the  gods 
On  one  far  height  in  one  far-shining  fire. 

If  Denieter  and  Persephone  was  written  about  the  time 
at  which  it  was  published,  in  1889,  it  is  a  wonderful 
proof  of  the  persistence  of  mature  power  in  old  age. 
Tennyson  was  eighty  years  of  age  when  this  poem  was 


140  Tennyson 

issued.  It  bears  no  traces  of  failing  strength,  or  of  out- 
worn  imagination.     Lines  like 

The  shrilly  whinnyings  of  the  team  of  Hell, 

or, 

The  sun 
Burst  from  a  swimming  fleece  of  winter  gray, 

are  as  clean-ringing  and  clear-eyed  as  any  written  in 
1842.  The  introduction,  with  the  slow  dawning  of  Per- 
sephone's recognition  of  the  earth,  and  of  her  mother 
who  is  the  Earth-mother,  is  as  good  as  the  introduction 
to  Lucretius,  as  delicate  and  tender  as  that  is  strong  and 
austere.  The  imaginative  thought  which  kept  the  sol- 
emn, unhuman  darkness  of  Hades  still  in  the  eyes  of 
Persephone — 

Child,  those  imperial,  disimpassioned  eyes 
Awed  even  me  at  first,  thy  mother — 

the  rapid  picture  of  the  lonely  Fates, 

And,  following  out 
A  league  of  labyrinthine  darkness,  came 
On  three  gray  heads  beneath  a  gleaming  rift, 

who  "  know  not  what  they  spin,"  and  cry,  "  There  is  a 
Fate  beyond  us  "  ;  the  dream  of  Demeter,  which  this 
cry  originates,  of  a  race  of  younger  and  kindlier  gods 
whose  reign  and  worship  will  be  love,  and  who  will  sub- 
due even  Hades  to  their  light  ;  the  sense  Tennyson  in- 
fuses into  his  readers  that  this  dream  is  born  out  of  the 
heart  of  the  kindly  earth  itself — not  a  Christian  thought 
but  an  anticipation  of  that  thought ;  the  ill-content  of 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842     141 

the  Earth-goddess  with  the  highest  gods  who  are  old  m 
their  careless  tyranny,  and  the  founding  of  this  ill- 
content  with  them  on  the  ground  that  she  is  naturally 
nearer  than  they  to  men  and  fonder  than  they  of  the 
works  of  men — is  she  not  the  mother  of  them  all  ? — the 
deep  sympathy  of  Demeter  with  the  earth-dwellers,  and 
naturally  her  greater  share  in  human  passion — especially 
the  most  human  of  all  passions,  that  of  motherhood — all 
these  ideas,  in  subtle,  half-suggested  images,  passed 
through  the  fire  of  imagination  and  made  lucid  and  crys- 
talline thereby,  are  wrought  into  the  poem  with  a  power 
which  seems  almost  incredible  in  a  poet  of  eighty  years. 
The  poem  smells  of  the  fruitful  rain-washed  earth  ; 
the  earth  breathes  and  is  pregnant  and  gives  birth  in  it  ; 
all  her  motherhood  loves  all  her  children  from  line  to 
line  of  it.  Motherhood,  first  of  the  earth,  and  then  of 
Humanity,  is  the  innermost  being  of  the  poem — the 
"  deathless  heart  of  motherhood."  At  last,  in  order  to 
make  this  universal  more  particular  and  more  at  home 
with  us,  the  personal  motherhood  of  Demeter,  the 
motherhood  of  one  heart  for  one  child,  is  driven  home 
to  our  imagination.  When  she  loses  her  child,  she  im- 
plores heaven  for  her,  she  wanders  over  all  lands  to  find 
her,  she  forgets  her  own  earth  ;  but  the  loveliest  thing 
she  does — and  it  is  imagined  with  infinite  tenderness — is 
to  console  all  the  troubled  mothers  of  the  world.  She 
gives  to  failing  children  the  same  breast  which  nurtured 
Persephone — 

Thy  breast  to  wailing  infants  in  the  night. 


142  Tennyson 

The  Death  of  Qtnone,  the  last  of  these  poems,  recalls 
the  earliest  of  them,  and  the  landscape  is  much  the 
same,  only,  as  it  is  winter  in  Qi^none's  heart,  it  is  now 
winter  by  the  cave  and  in  the  glade,  where  formerly, 
at  the  coming  of  the  goddesses,  the  greensward  of  spring 
burst  into  fire.  And  Paris  comes  to  see  her  as  of  old, 
but  now 

Lame,  crooked,  reeling,  livid,  thro'  the  mist, 

to  beg  her  to  heal  him  of  his  grievous  wound.  She 
refuses  ;  a  woman  after  ten  years  of  brooding  wrath  and 
pain  was  not  likely  to  forgive.  He  passes  away  into  the 
mist,  dies,  and  is  burnt  on  a  pyre  by  the  shepherds. 
vShe  flings  herself  on  the  pyre.  I  do  not  know  the  date 
of  this  poem — there  can  never  be  any  proper  study  of 
Tennyson  until  all  these  late-published  poems  are  accu- 
rately dated — but  it  is  quite  plain  that  the  mind  which 
grasped  Ulysses,  Lucretius,  or  even  Tiresias,  has  here  lost 
much  of  its  power.  It  is  well  put  together  as  a  little 
tale  ;  but  the  subject  is  not  seized  by  the  right  handles. 
I  cannot  guess  to  what  idea  or  emotion  in  Tennyson's 
mind  the  story  has  been  sacrificed,  but  it  is  sacrificed. 
It  is  too  improbable  that  Paris  should  walk  up  Ida  to 
call  for  CEnone,  considering  where  and  how  he  was 
wounded  ;  or  stagger  down  the  hill  from  her.  If  the 
art  of  the  piece  were  made  better  by  this  change  in  the 
tale,  this  criticism  would  be  nought  ;  but  it  is  not  made 
better,  and  the  improbability  is  impossibility.  Nor  do  T 
understand  the  husband  and  wife  and  widow  business, 


Classical  and  Romantic  Poems  of  1842      143 

unless  it  be  that  Tennyson  desired  to  express  over  again 
his  devotion  to  the  eternity  and  sanctity  of  the  marriage 
relation.  This  is  wholly  out  of  place  in  the  story.  The 
union  between  Paris  and  the  nymph  CEnone  was  not  a 
marriage  nor  anything  that  resembled  it.  When  we 
come  to 

Her  husband  in  the  flush  of  youth  and  dawn, 

we  do  not  know  where  we  are.  We  are  certainly  not  on 
Ida.  When  we  hear  CEnone's  answer  to  the  cry  of  Paris 
for  help,  we  are  in  the  midst,  not  of  the  light  unions 
between  Greek  mortals  and  the  nymphs,  but  of  the 
social  moralities  of  England. 

Adulterer, 
Go  back  to  thine  adulteress  and  die  ! 

This  is  not  credible  on  the  lips  of  CEnone.  Still  more 
strange  is  that  which  follows,  still  more  distant  from 
Greek  thought.  Qinone,  the  mountain  nymph,  dreams 
that  Paris  calls  to  her  from  the  other  world  to  come  to 
him,  and  has  repented  his  unfaithfulness  : 

Come  to  me, 
CEnone  !  I  can  wrong  thee  now  no  more, 
QLnone,  my  CEnone. 

Christian,  it  may  be,  but  not  Greek  ;  and,  still  more,  not 
possible  for  a  nymph  to  dream.  And  the  end  is  equally 
out  of  the  question.  It  is  a  pretty  thought  in  itself,  and 
might  well  belong  to  a  mo'tal  woman,  even  to  an  Orien- 
tal pagan,  but  it  does  not  belong  to  a  mountain  nymph 


144 


Tennyson 


of  the   Greek  imagination  who  never  dreamt  of   mar- 
riage and  would  have  smiled  at  any  union  of  the  kind  : 

And  all  at  once 
The  morning  light  of  happy  marriage  broke 
Thro'  all  the  clouded  years  of  widowhood, 
And  muffling  up  her  comely  head,  and  crying 
"  Husband  !  "  she  leapt  upon  the  funeral  pile, 
And  mixt  herself  with  him  and  past  in  fire. 


CHAPTER   V 
THE     PRINCESS 

/TV  MEMORIAM  is  the  most  complete,  most 
rounded  to  a  polished  sphere,  of  the  larger  poems 
of  Tennyson  ;  the  Idylls  of  the  King  is  the  most  am- 
bitious ;  Maud  is  the  loveliest,  most  rememberable  ;  and 
The  Princess  is  the  most  delightful.  Holiday-hearted, 
amazingly  varied,  charming  our  leisured  ease  from  page 
to  page,  it  is  a  poem  to  read  on  a  sunny  day  in  one  of 
those  rare  places  in  the  world  where  '  there  is  no  clock 
in  the  forest,"  where  the  weight  and  worry  of  the  past, 
the  present,  or  the  future,  do  not  make  us  conscious  of 
their  care.  There  is  no  sorrow  or  sense  of  the  sorrow 
of  the  world  in  it.  The  man  who  wrote  it  had  reached 
maturity,  but  there  is  none  of  the  heaviness  of  maturity 
in  its  light  movement.  It  is  really  gay,  as  young  as  the 
Prince  himself  who  is  its  hero  ;  and  the  dreams  and  de- 
sires of  youth  flit  and  linger  in  it  as  summer  bees  around 
the  honied  flowers.  A  great  charm  is  thus  given  to  the 
poem.     We  feel  for  it  the  affection  which  is  bestowed 

on  youthfulness  by  those  who  have  passed  by  youthful- 
lo  145 


146  Tennyson 

ness,  that  half-regret,  half-tenderness,  and  sweet  memory 
in  both,  the  sadness  of  which  is  not  too  much,  and  the 
pleasure  of  which  is  not  too  little. 

Mingled  with  the  youthfulness  in  the  poem  is  the 
serious  thought  of  manhood.  There  is  enough  of  grav- 
ity to  dignify  the  subject-matter,  and  enough  of  play  to 
take  dulness  out  of  the  gravity.  The  poem  is  like  the 
gray  statue  of  Sir  Ralph  robed  with  Lilia's  orange  scarf 
and  rosy  silk.  Of  course,  this  twofold  element  adds  to 
that  variety  which  stirs  new  pleasure  and  new  thinking 
from  page  to  page.  But  beyond  that,  the  scheme  of  the 
poem  enabled  Tennyson  to  invent  all  kinds  of  fantastic 
events  that  follow  one  another  as  thickly  as  they  do  in  a 
romantic  tale  ;  and  he  is  up  to  the  level  of  the  invention 
required.  One  scarcely  expects  him  to  do  this  with 
ease.  Inventiveness  of  incident  lags  somewhat  in  Tenny- 
son's work.  The  invention  of  the  greater  number  of  the 
episodes  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King  is  excellent.  The  in- 
vention of  the  events  which  carry  on  the  story  is  not  so 
good,  and  it  is  certainly  not  opulent.  Moreover,  we  see 
in  the  dramas  how  slow-moving  his  inventiveness  is  ; 
their  movement  continually  drags  from  the  want  of  that 
which  the  dramatists  call  business.  Here,  however,  the 
story  runs  along  with  a  lively  variety  both  of  characters 
and  events  glancing  and  charming  through  it. 

This  variety  is  still  more  increased  by  the  mingling 
of  ancient  and  modern  in  the  poem — modern  science 
jostling  with  ancient  manners,  modern  dress  with 
ancient   arms,   girls'    colleges    with    tournaments ;    the 


The  Princess 


147 


woman-question  of  to-day  with  the  woman-ideal  of  the 
days  of  chivalry  ;  Joan  of  Arc  with  the  Cambridge  girl  ; 
and  the  rising  out  of  both — out  of  the  old  and  the  new 
— first,  Tennyson's  own  view  of  womanhood,  and  sec- 
ondly, that  which  is  always  old  and  new,  the  eternal 
feminine  face  to  face  with  the  eternal  masculine.  More- 
over, this  variety  is  kindled  and  brightened  with  the 
steady  fire  of  Tennyson's  imagination — not,  in  this 
poem,  the  imagination  which  pierces  to  the  depths  of  the 
human  heart  (for  the  half-serious,  half-grotesque  form 
precluded  that),  but  the  imagination  which  illustrates 
human  life  by  analogies  drawn  from  Nature.  Each 
comparison  fits  at  every  point ;  and  the  things  in  Nature 
which  are  used  as  comparisons  are  not  only  described 
with  extraordinary  accuracy,  choice,  and  truth,  but  are 
also  seen  with  such  love  that  their  inmost  heart  is 
touched.  When  King  Gama  is  sketched,  his  voice  is 
cracked  and  small : 

But  bland  the  smile  that  like  a  wrinkling  wind 
On  glassy  water  drove  his  cheek  in  lines. 

Cyril,  the  Prince's  friend,  "  has  a  solid  base  of  tempera- 
ment," but  is  on  the  surface  lightly  blown  by  impulse. 
He  is  like  the  water-lily,  which  starts  and  slides 

Upon  the  level  in  little  puffs  of  wind, 
Tho'  anchor'd  to  the  bottom — such  is  he. 

The  eyes  of  Lady   Blanche,  full  of  malice,  are  like 
"  the  green  malignant  light  of  coming  storm,"  and  the 


148  Tennyson 

line  is  charged  with  the  very  colour  and  rage  of  tempest 
on  the  horizon.  There  are  two  similes  of  the  Princess 
in  wrath,  one  in  which  the  jewel  on  her  brow  is  like 
"  the  mystic  fire  on  a  masthead,  prophet  of  storm,"  and 
the  other  where  she  stands  above  the  tossing  crowd  of 
rebellious  girls  like  a  beacon-tower  above  the  waves 
of  tempest,  which  are  as  absolutely  fitted  to  the  emo- 
tions they  illustrate  as  the  glove  to  the  hand.  Her  angry 
and  scornful  smile  is  compared — and  the  Nature  picture 
is  superb — to 

A  stroke  of  cruel  sunshine  on  the  cliff, 

When  all  the  glens  are  drown'd  in  azure  gloom 

Of  thunder-shower. 

When  she  is  compassed  by  two  armies  and  the  noise  of 
arms,  she  stands  like  a  stately  pine  on  an  island,  on  each 
side  of  which  a  great  cataract  divides,  "  when  storm  is 
on  the  heights,"  and  the  torrents  roll, 

Suck'd  from  the  dark  heart  of  the  long  hills— 

a  splendid  concentration  of  natural  truth.  When  she 
knows  that  all  her  purpose  is  overthrown,  Tennyson 
uses  what  he  must  often  have  himself  seen  from  the 
downs  of  Freshwater  to  express  her  pain  : 

As  one  that  climbs  a  peak  to  gaze 
O'er  land  and  main,  and  sees  a  great  black  cloud 
Drag  inward  from  the  deeps,  a  wall  of  night. 
Blot  out  the  slope  of  sea  from  verge  to  shore, 
And  suck  the  blinding  splendour  from  the  sand. 
And  quenching  lake  by  lake  and  tarn  by  tarn, 
Expunge  the  world. 


The  Princess  149 

This  and  the  equally  fine  description  of  the  whirlwind 
tell  of  Nature  in  giant  effort.     But  he  can  see  the  deli- 
cate, minute  things  of  Nature  just  as  clearly  and  describe 
them  with  equal  force.     There  is  an  image  of  a  maiden's 
thoughts  and  ways  which  is  as  new  as  it  is  lovely. 

Not  a  thought,  a  touch 

But  pure  as  lines  of  green  that  streak  the  white 
Of  the  first  snow-drop's  inner  leaves. 

And  when  he  wishes  to  reveal  how  two  young  hearts  slid 
into  love,  he  says  it  was  no  more  strange 

Than  when  two  dew-drops  on  the  petal  shake 
To  the  same  sweet  air,  and  tremble  deeper  down, 
And  slip  at  last  all-fragrant  into  one. 

A  perfect  image — but  to  what  minute  observation  it 
bears  witness  !  In  these  examples  alone  what  a  range 
of  vision  !  How  many  things  and  sights  were  noted 
and  stored  up  before  these  were  chosen  to  use  !  In 
what  a  lucid  light  they  were  seen  !  With  what  truth, 
and,  more  difficult  still  to  do,  with  what  clearness,  fit- 
ness, finish,  and  choice  expressed  !  This  is  the  artist's 
keen  eye,  observant  love  and  trained  capacity,  working 
together,  and  it  is  a  pleasure  to  be  led  by  it  to  observe 
more  lovingly  the  world  of  Nature.  From  point  to  point 
this  method  of  illustrating — a  method  he  learned  from 
Homer — enlightens  and  expands  the  poem. 

These  belong  to  the  qualities  of  Tennyson's  mind, 
but  in  the  prologue  and  epilogue  of  The  Princess,  as 
well  as  in  the  poem  itself,  we  have  a  picture  of  some 


150  Tennyson 

points  in  his  character.  He  feels  that  he  is  of  the 
North  rather  than  of  the  South. 

And  dark  and  true  and  tender  is  the  North, 
is  a  line  in  which  he  paints  what  he  wished  to  be.  His 
Prince  is  of  the  North,  and  has  that  special  mysticism 
of  the  North  which  appears  in  the  dreams  so  constantly 
told  in  the  Icelandic  Sagas.  He  frequently  loses  con- 
sciousness of  the  outward,  or  rather  he  loses  the  con- 
sciousness of  its  reality.  All  around  him  becomes 
visionary,  or  the  visionary  world  becomes  the  real  world, 
till  he  is  not  able  to  distinguish  between  both. 

On  a  sudden  in  the  midst  of  men  and  day. 
And  while  I  walk'd  and  talk'd  as  heretofore, 
I  seem'd  to  move  among  a  world  of  ghosts, 
And  feel  myself  the  shadow  of  a  dream — 

That  is  Tennyson.  He  talks  of  it  as  a  "  weird  seizure," 
but  it  is  a  common  experience.  The  sudden  unsubstan- 
tialising  of  the  outward  world,  of  all  events  and  places, 
was  Wordsworth's  frequent  feeling.  It  is  not,  indeed, 
the  unique  property  of  the  poets,  but  it  brings  before  us 
the  half-pantheistic  idealism  which  dwelt  in  Tenny- 
son's nature  side  by  side  with  his  sturdy  realism.  The 
same  experience  is  alluded  to  in  The  Holy  Graily  and  is 
put  in  the  mouth  of  Arthur  : 

Let  visions  of  the  night  or  of  the  day 
Come,  as  they  will  ;  and  many  a  time  they  come, 
Until  this  earth  he  walks  on  seems  not  earth, 
The  light  that  strikes  his  eyeball  is  not  light, 
This  air  that  smites  his  forehead  is  not  air, 
But  vision — yea.  his  very  hand  and  foot — 


The  Princess 


151 


Right  opposite  to  this  is  that  rough  forcibleness,  that 
downright  squareness  which  in  him  called  a  spade  a 
spade,  and  which  is  at  the  root  of  so  many  of  the  poems. 
Both  opposites  were  well  represented  in  his  figure — the 
great-boned,  loose-limbed,  gigantesque  man,  with  his 
domed  head — and  the  soft  dark  hair,  the  gentle  eyes, 
and  the  white,  smooth,  fine-lined  brow,  covered  with  deli- 
cate skin  through  which  the  blue  veins  shone.  Force 
and  fineness  were  married  in  his  face  and  form  as  well 
as  in  his  verse. 

Then  in  this  prologue  and  epilogue  there  are  other 
characteristics  of  what  he  had  become.  His  fancy  for 
science,  and  for  the  age  in  which  he  lived  being  made 
great  by  science,  which  springs  to  light  in  Locksky  Hall, 
has  grown  in  this  poem.  His  Princess's  favourite  study 
is  the  Natural  Sciences,  She  thinks  that  learning  and 
philosophy  will  be  the  salvation  of  women.  The  holi- 
day-makers in  the  prologue  are  taught  by  facts  ;  elec- 
tricity, steam,  hydraulics  go  hand-in-hand  with  the 
rustics  sports.  We  have  somewhat  too  much  of  this. 
An  artist  caniiot  introduce  Physical  Science  into  his  art- 
work without  introducing  trouble  into  it.  Now  and 
again  he  may  play  with  its  results,  but  it  must  be  play. 
Tennyson  did  not  always  play  with  it,  and  he  sometimes 
seemed  to  feel  that  Science  was  more  important  than 
Art.  Whenever  he  did,  his  poetry  suffered.  However, 
there  are  traces  enough,  especially  in  his  later  poems, 
that  he  was  weary  of  the  claim  of  Science  to  be  greater 
than  Art,  and  that  he  feared  it  might  stifle  poetry  : 


152  Tennyson 

Let  Science  prove  we  are,  and  then, 
What  matters  Science  unto  men, 
At  least  to  me  ? 

And   he   speaks  still   more  particularly  in  a  poem,  the 
Parnassus  of  1889  : 

What  be  those  two  shapes  high  over  the  sacred  fountain, 

Taller  than  all  the  Muses,  and  huger  than  all  the  mountain  ? 

On  those  two  known  peaks  they  stand  ever  spreading  and 
heightening  ; 

Poet,  that  evergreen  laurel  is  blasted  by  more  than  lightning  ! 

Look,  in  their  deep  double  shadow  the  crown'd  ones  all  disap- 
pearing ! 

Sing  like  a  bird  and  be  happy,  nor  hope  for  a  deathless  hearing  ! 

"  Sounding  for  ever  and  ever  ?  "     Pass  on  !  the  sight  confuses — 

These  are  Astronomy  and  Geology,  terrible  Muses  I 

It  makes  me  happier  to  read  that  poem,  for  I  know  then 
that  he  was  saved  from  the  impertinent  despotism  which 
claims  that  the  reasoning  intellect  is  higher  than  the 
imagination,  and  the  work  of  Science  of  more  impor- 
tance to  man  than  the  work  of  Art.  We  see  then,  that, 
in  his  old  age,  Tennyson  felt  that  beauty  and  the  repre- 
sentation of  it  were  being  crowded  out  of  the  world 
by  Science.  But  we  also  see  in  the  end  of  that 
poem  how  he  consoles  himself.  "  If  the  poets,"  he 
answers,  "  are  crushed  here,  they  need  not  greatly  care. 
They  sing  their  songs  for  ever,  and  other  worlds  listen." 
Then,  too,  his  political  judgments  appear  ;  and 
though  I  have  already  alluded  to  them  in  the  introduc- 
tion to  this  book,  it  seems  needful  to  touch  on  them 
again  in  connection  with  this  prologue.     We  find  the 


The  Princess  153 

honest  Whig  views  of  1840,  modified  from  their  uni- 
versal aims  by  a  cherished  insularity  ;  a  fancy  for  the 
squirearchy  as  the  backbone  of  England  ;  a  sense  that 
the  English  temper,  of  which  he  knew  nothing  below  the 
middle  class,  is  the  only  temper  in  which  freedom 
grows  straight.  With  this  there  is  a  steady  contempt  for 
France,  modified  by  the  thought  which  seems  at  some 
odd  moments  to  have  made  a  lodgment  in  his  mind, 
that  social  theories  and  dreams  and  the  wild  popular 
storms  that  follow  them  may  be  of  more  use  than  we 
think.  It  occurs  to  him  at  times  that  the  world  does 
not  always  move  as  England  moves,  by  broadening 
slowly  down  from  precedent  to  precedent.  It  may  be 
there  is  some  use  and  need,  he  thinks,  for  revolutions. 
The  passage  I  mean  begins  : 

"  Look  there,  a  garden  !  "  said  my  college  friend, 
The  Tory  member's  elder  son, 

and  he  points  to  the  coast  of  France,  and  contrasts 
**  our  Britain  whole  within  herself,  a  nation  yet,"  having 
a  sense  of  duty,  reverence  for  law,  some  civic  manhood 
firm  against  the  crowd,  with  France  and  the  mock 
heroics  of  France.  And  the  whole  speech  and  the  reply 
to  it  are  replete  with  Tennyson,  of  the  same  mint  as  the 
poem,  "  Love  thou  thy  land  with  love  far  brought,"  in 
the  volume  of  1842,  "  Have  patience,"  answers  another 
friend,  "ourselves  are  full  of  social  wrong."  It  is 
Tennyson's  modification  of  the  insular  view.  And 
indeed,  in  1847,  the  state  of  the  agricultural  labourer, 


154  Tennyson 

here  pictured  on  one  day  of  holiday  and  feasting  in  the 
year,  under  the  generosity  of  Sir  Walter, 

A  great,  broad-shoulder'd,  genial  Englishman, 

was  scarcely  an  inch  better  than  it  was  in  the  year  1830, 
when  all  rural  England  was  a  cry  of  misery.  One  of 
the  similes  in  The  Princess  is  derived  from  the  rick- 
burning  into  which  the  horrors  of  starvation  and  dis- 
ease had  driven  the  people.  Of  all  this,  Tennyson  had 
either  little  conception — only  a  few  cared  then,  and  he 
was  of  his  time — or  he  was  absorbed  in  the  glory  of  that 
English  country  life  in  hall  and  park  and  comfortable 
farm  which  he  paints  so  well,  as  if  that  included  more 
than  a  tenth  of  the  rural  populntion.  What  of  the  rest  ? 
The  time  thought  little  of  them,  neither  did  Tennyson  ; 
and  the  crowd  around  the  abbey  where  The  Princess  is 
invented  are  content  to  cry,  and  Tennyson  seems  to 
think  it  is  enough  for  them  to  ask — 

Why  should  not  these  great  Sirs 
Give  up  their  parks  some  dozen  times  a  year 
To  let  the  people  breathe  ? 

This  is  Tennyson  in  the  prologue.  As  to  the  poem, 
itself,  it  enshrines  the  woman's  question  as  it  appeared 
nearly  fifty  years  ago,  and  considering  all  that  has  been 
done  since  then,  it  is  a  prophetic  utterance.  A  good 
deal  which  is  here  suggested  under  a  mock-heroic  mask 
has  actually  been  put  into  practical  form.  Moreover,  he 
has  touched,  with  grace  and  clearness,  a  number  of  the 
phases  of  opinion  which  now  prevail,  and  which   then 


The  Princess  155 

had  only  begun  to  prevail  ;  embodying  each  phase  in 
one  of  his  characters.  The  woman's  question  owes  a 
great  deal  to  The  Princess.  It  has  been  objected  to  it 
by  the  women  who  want  humour  (that  want  so  strange 
and  yet  so  common  in  women)  and  who  have  the  faith 
that  science  solves  all  questions  (that  faith  so  unex- 
pected by  those  who  have  the  traditional  conception  of 
a  special  spirituality  in  women),  "  that  the  poem  is  not 
serious,  not  argumentative,  not  set  on  a  foundation  of 
facts.  The  question  can  only  be  solved  by  knowledge, 
argument,  and  action." 

This  objection  would  be  valid  if  this  were  a  treatise, 
and  not  a  poem.  But  here  the  question  is  brought  into 
the  sphere  of  art,  and  it  must  be  treated  in  the  manner 
of  art.  If  it  is  to  be  made  the  subject  of  a  poem,  it 
must  not  be  argumentative,  it  must  not  be  scientific,  and 
it  must  not  be  serious  except  when  emotion  intervenes. 
The  moment  it  argues,  it  loses  its  place  in  the  world  of 
art.  Every  point  then  which  would  naturally  be  argued 
by  the  understanding  in  a  treatise,  must  here  be  worked 
by  the  imagination  ;  and  lest  the  poem  should  by  any 
chance  slide  into  reasoning,  a  gamesome  element  is 
added  to  it,  to  protect  it  from  becoming  scientific. 
Tennyson,  who  was  an  artist,  understood  this  clearly, 
and  wrought  out  his  method  with  care  before  he  began. 
He  is  never  serious  in  The  Princess,  except  when  the 
deep  affections  of  humanity  enter  into  the  movement  of 
the  piece ;  and  the  affections,  in  spite  of  all  the  wise- 
acres, are  not  subject  to  logic.     Science,  if  it  have  the 


156  Tennyson 

insolence  to  ascend  the  steps  of  their  palace,  falls  dead 
upon  its  threshold.  When,  then,  the  affections  come  in, 
Tennyson  steps  into  seriousness,  but  when  he  has  to  put 
opinions,  he  is  light  and  gay  ;  and  art  obliged  him,  on 
such  a  subject,  to  be  serious  and  gay  by  turns.  The 
result  was,  that  he  was  compelled  to  choose  a  mock- 
heroic  form  in  which  to  build  his  poem.  This  would 
enable  him  to  be  sometimes  lively  and  sometimes  grave, 
sometimes  grotesque  and  sometimes  noble,  sometimes 
chivalrous  and  sometimes  full  of  raillery,  and  sometimes 
mingling  both  these  opposites  ;  and  the  choice  of  this 
mode  of  building  his  poem  gave  him  great  room  for 
ranging,  and  varied  opportunities  for  imagination. 
"What  style  would  suit?"  he  asks. 

The  men  required  that  I  should  give  throughout 

The  sort  of  mock-heroic  gigantesque, 

With  which  we  banter'd  little  Lilia  first  : 

The  women — and  perhaps  they  felt  their  power, 

For  something  in  the  ballads  which  they  sang, 

Or  in  their  silent  influence  as  they  sat, 

Had  ever  seem'd  to  wrestle  with  burlesque, 

And  drove  us,  last,  to  quite  a  solemn  close — 

They  hated  banter,  wish'd  for  something  real, 

A  gallant  fight,  a  noble  princess — why 

Not  make  her  true-heroic — true  sublime  ? 

Or  all,  they  said,  as  earnest  as  the  close? 

Which  yet  with  such  a  framework  scarce  could  be. 

Then  rose  a  little  feud  betwixt  the  two. 

Betwixt  the  mockers  and  the  realists  : 

And  I,  betwixt  them  both,  to  please  them  both, 

And  yet  to  give  the  story  as  it  rose, 

I  moved  as  in  a  strange  diagonal. 

And  maybe  neither  pleased  myself  nor  them. 


The  Princess  157 

It  is  not  often  that  an  artist  explains  the  way  in  which 
he  came  to  choose  the  form  of  his  architecture,  but, 
given  his  subject,  he  could  not  have  chosen  it  better. 
The  Prince  has  been  betrothed  to  a  Princess  in  the 
South,  and  made  her  his  ideal,  loving  her  from  her  por- 
trait. His  father  sends  an  embassage  to  claim  her  for 
his  son.  His  claim  is  put  off  ;  the  Princess  refuses  to 
marry.  She,  enthralled  with  the  idea  of  rescuing  women 
from  the  slavery  of  man,  has  founded  a  college  for  girls 
into  which  no  man  shall  enter  on  pain  of  death.  The 
Prince  with  two  college  friends  goes  on  adventure  to 
find  the  Princess.  They  disguise  themselves  as  girls 
and  penetrate  into  the  college,  betray  themselves,  are 
discovered,  and  would  have  been  slain,  had  not  the 
Prince  saved  the  life  of  the  Princess.  The  three  men 
are  thrust  out  of  gates  with  contumely.  The  Princess 
refuses  all  overtures  of  marriage,  and  summons  her  three 
brothers,  huge  warriors,  to  support  her  cause.  Both 
sides  agree  to  settle  the  question  by  a  tournament  of 
fifty  against  fifty  knights,  and  the  Prince  and  his  party 
are  wounded  and  overthrown.  Ida,  the  Princess,  moved 
by  the  fate  of  a  child  who  is  the  pivot  of  the  action  here, 
admits  all  the  wounded  to  the  college,  dissolves  the  col- 
lege, and,  in  tending  the  wounded  Prince,  finds  love  at 
her  heart,  and  they  are  knit  together.  These  are  the 
main  lines  of  the  story.  Each  of  these  male  characters 
has  his  own  opinion  about  womanhood  and  its  sphere, 
the  Prince  and  his  father,  Cyril  and  Florian  the  two 
friends  of  the  Prince,  the  King,  the  father  of  the  Prin- 


158  Tennyson 

cess,  and  Arac  her  brother.  Six  men  then  deliver  six 
views  of  womanhood,  embodying  six  phases  of  the  ques- 
tion. Then  the  women  have  also  their  say.  We  hear 
the  view  of  the  mother  of  the  Prince  who  is  dead  ;  we 
have  the  view  of  Lady  Blanche  who  educated  the  Prin- 
cess to  despise  love  and  set  women  against  men  ;  of 
the  Princess's  friend,  Lady  Psyche,  who  is  the  child's 
mother  ;  of  Melissa,  a  young  maiden,  and  of  the  mob 
of  girls  at  college  ;  finally,  of  the  Princess  herself ;  so 
that  through  the  piece  almost  every  phase  of  opinion  on 
the  matter  is  delivered  by  both  men  and  women.  This 
is  done  with  great  skill  and  charming  art.  In  the  midst, 
the  various  offices  of  womanhood  are  brought  forward  by 
the  events  of  the  story,  and  become  part  of  the  question 
to  be  solved.  Moreover,  what  motherhood  is,  is  shown 
in  two  instances  ;  what  maidenhood  is,  is  also  displayed. 
And  woman's  friendship  with  woman  is  introduced. 
All  these,  both  those  which  belong  to  the  men  and  those 
which  belong  to  the  women,  run  up  at  last  into  the  Prin- 
cess and  are  bound  around  her,  so  that  she  stands  forth 
alone,  the  centre  of  the  poem.  They  also  run  up  into 
the  Prince,  but  he  is  kept  subordinate,  as  the  poem  de- 
manded, even  when,  at  the  end,  he  gets  his  way.  His 
opinion  prevails,  but  his  personality  is  less  than  that  of 
the  Princess.     This  is  all  admirable  art. 

The  scenery,  too,  of  the  piece  is  delightful,  full  of 
sunshine,  gaiety,  and  grace.  The  college,  with  its 
grounds  and  high-wrought  architecture,  courts  and  gar- 
dens, walls  and  fountains,  brightened  with  glnncing  girls 


The  Princess  159 

and  silken-clad  professors,  is  charmingly  imagined.  We 
see  the  view  from  its  walls.  The  Prince  stands  upon  the 
northern  terrace  : 

And  leaning  there  on  those  balusters,  high 
Above  the  empurpled  champaign,  drank  the  gale 
That  blown  about  the  foliage  underneath. 
And  sated  with  the  innumerable  rose, 
Beat  calm  upon  our  eyelids. 

We  watch  the  Princess,  creator  of  all  this  beauty,  in  the 
great  hall,  in  the  fountain-splashing  courts,  in  the  gar- 
dens, among  the  hills  which  border  the  park,  on  the  great 
meadows  of  the  tumbling  river,  erect  upon  the  battle- 
ments above  the  gates — and  we  see  grouped  around  her, 
the  whole  country,  as  if  with  the  actual  eye.  Then  we 
look  on  the  warrior  camps,  on  the  tournament  and  on 
the  battle-field  ;  and  then  on  the  women,  issuing  from 
the  great  bronze  valves,  and  moving  through  the  trees  to 
tend  the  wounded.  And,  last  of  all,  we  see  the  college 
again,  its  building  filled  with  the  wounded,  and  the  girls 
who  stayed  flitting  through  it  from  couch  to  couch, 
or  learning  love  in  its  bosky  alleys.  So  vividly  is  it  all 
draAvn,  that  a  painter  might  paint  from  point  to  point 
what  the  poet  has  created.     The  passage  beginning — 

We  dropt  with  evening  on  a  rustic  town, 
Set  in  a  gleaming  river's  crescent-curve, 
Close  at  the  boundary  of  the  liberties, 

will  illustrate  this  careful  scene-painting — a  word  I  use 
without  its  depreciating  note. 

Nature  is  not  described  for  her  own  sake,  but  inwoven 


i6o  Tennyson 

in  Tennyson's  manner  with  the  emotions  of  those  who 
are  looking  upon  it.  When  the  Prince,  full  of  youthful 
ardour,  resolves  to  follow  his  dream,  all  the  woods  and 
wind  are  with  him  ;  her  picture  lies 

In  the  green  gleam  of  dewy-tassell'd  trees, 

and  all  the  mingled  sounds  of  woods  are  shaken  into 
one  cry  of  "  Follow,  follow."  The  lines  I  quote  below 
exactly  express  that  which  is  so  rarely  observed — the 
different  murmur  of  differently  foliaged  trees  in  a  faint 
wind  which  a  fine  ear  can  distinguish  in  a  wood,  but 
which,  when  a  fuller  puff  goes  by,  are  merged  into  one 
chorus  with  the  singing  of  birds  and  tossing  of  boughs  : 

A  wind  arose  and  rush'd  upon  the  South, 

And  shook  the  songs,  the  whispers,  and  the  shrieks 

Of  the  wild  woods  together  ;  and  a  Voice 

Went  with  it,  "  Follow,  follow,  thou  shalt  win." 

When  the  Prince  has  reached  the  college  where  the 
Princess  lives,  this  fine  picture  of  the  sea  at  night  is 
equally  descriptive  of  the  fulness  of  his  heart,  and  the 
prophecy  it  makes  and  loves. 

Half  in  doze  I  seem'd 
To  float  about  a  glimmering  night,  and  watch 
A  full  sea,  glazed  with  muffled  moonlight,  swell 
On  some  dark  shore  just  seen  that  it  was  rich. 

And  when  the  dawn  of  love  in  the  Princess's  heart  is 
beginning,  the  early  dawn  of  nature  to  which  he  com- 
pares it  was  never  more  fully  or  more  tenderly  imagined 
than  in  these  lines  of  lovely  simplicity — 


The  Princess  i6i 

Till  notice  of  a  change  in  the  dark  world 
Was  lispt  about  the  acacias,  and  a  bird. 
That  early  woke  to  feed  her  little  ones. 
Sent  from  a  dewy  breast  a  cry  for  light. 

In  the  poem,  however,  there  is  no  elaborate  descrip- 
tion of  landscape.  The  Nature  touches  are  chiefly  in 
the  comparisons  ;  and  this  is  fitly  so,  for  the  human 
interest  is  manifold.  In  a  single-subject  poem  like  The 
Gardener's  Daughter  or  CEnone,  it  is  not  out  of  place  to 
have  a  long  description  of  Nature.  The  full  scenery 
then  illustrates  and  enforces  the  simple  subject.  But 
long  descriptions  of  Nature  in  a  story  with  many  char- 
acters and  events,  would  divert  the  interest  from  the 
movement.  Like  Homer  then,  and  following  him, 
Tennyson  keeps  his  Nature  in  this  heroic  tale  chiefly  for 
his  similes,  to  strengthen  from  time  to  time  moments  of 
passion  in  the  tale. 

The  one  piece,  moreover,  in  the  poem  which  is  fully 
descriptive  of  Nature,  is  not  in  the  story.  It  is  a  part 
of  an  interlude — the  Idyll  read  by  the  Princess  while 
she  sits  by  the  bedside  of  the  Prince.  In  its  midst 
is  a  noble  and  unique  gathering  together  of  the  sights 
and  sounds  and  of  the  destroying  horror  of  the  deep 
recesses  of  the  upper  Alpine  gorges,  followed  by  a  con- 
centration into  three  lines  of  the  sweetness  and  charm 
of  the  pastoral  vales  of  the  Alps.  "  Come  down,  sweet 
maid,"  cried  the  shepherd  from  the  heights,  "  for  love 
is  of  the  valley."     Love  does  not  care  to  walk 

With  Death  and  Morning  on  the  silver  horns. 
Nor  wilt  thou  snare  him  in  the  white  ravine, 


i62  Tennyson 

Nor  find  him  dropt  upon  the  firths  of  ice, 
That  huddling  slant  in  furrow-cloven  falls 
To  roll  the  torrent  out  of  dusky  doors  : 
But  follow  ;  let  the  torrent  dance  thee  down 
To  find  him  in  the  valley  :  let  the  wild 
Lean-headed  eagles  yelp  alone,  and  leave 
The  monstrous  ledges  there  to  slope,  and  spill 
Their  thousand  wreaths  of  dangling  water-smoke 
That  like  a  broken  purpose  waste  in  air  ; 
So  waste  not  thou  :  but  come  ;  for  all  the  vales 
Await  thee  ;  azure  pillars  of  the  hearth 
Arise  to  thee  ;  the  children  call,  and  I 
Thy  shepherd  pipe,  and  sweet  is  every  sound. 
Sweeter  thy  voice,  but  every  sound  is  sweet  ; 
Myriads  of  rivulets  hurrying  thro'  the  lawn. 
The  moan  of  doves  in  immemorial  elms, 
And  murmuring  of  innumerable  bees. 

Finally,  with  regard  to  the  poem  as  distinguished  from 
the  social  question  it  speaks  of,  beauty  is  kept  in  it  pre- 
eminent. 

It  is  first  in  Tennyson's,  as  it  ought  to  be  in  every 
artist's  heart.  The  subject-matter  is  bent  to  the  ne- 
cessity of  beauty.  The  knowledge  displayed  in  it,  the 
various  theories  concerning  womanhood,  the  choice  of 
scenery,  the  events,  are  all  chosen  and  arranged  so  as  to 
render  it  possible  to  enshrine  them  in  beautiful  shapes. 
This  general  direction  towards  loveliness  is  never  lost 
sight  of  by  the  poet.  It  is  not  that  moral  aims  are 
neglected,  or  the  increase  of  human  good,  or  the  height- 
ening of  truth,  or  the  declaring  of  knowledge  ;  but  it  is 
that  all  these  things  are  made  subservient  to  the  mani- 
festation of  beauty.  It  is  the  artist's  way,  and  it  is  the 
highest  way.     To  say  this  seems  to   many   to   say  the 


The  Princess  163 

wrong  thing.  To  put  the  manifestation  of  beauty  on  a 
higher  level  than  the  manifestation  of  morality  or  knowl- 
edge appears  to  them  to  be  too  bold.  It  is  to  say  that 
Art  does  more  for  the  world,  and  teaches  better  things 
than  either  Science  or  Ethics.  But  the  saying  does  not 
seem  so  strange  when  we  define  beauty  as  the  form  of 
love,  and  its  innumerably  various  images  as  the  images 
of  the  thoughts  of  love. 

The  underlying  cause  of  beauty  in  all  art  is  this  love 
in  the  artist's  soul,  as  well  as  the  love  which,  existing  in 
others  and  in  nature  outside  of  himself,  he  represents  in 
his  art.  The  greater  the  artist,  the  greater  his  capacity 
for  loving  and  for  seeing  and  feeling  in  men  and  women 
what  is  loving.  The  greater  too  is  his  desire  for  creat- 
ing its  images  and  the  intensity  with  which  he  strives  to 
perfect  his  gift  of  creation.  This  was  the  longing,  and 
this  the  strife  of  Tennyson  from  end  to  end  of  his  life. 

The  Princess  is  only  one  illustration  of  these  things. 
The  woman's  question  is  not  by  itself  a  lovely  thing. 
But  it  is  made  beautiful  in  The  Princess,  because  every 
one  of  its  issues  is  solved  by  love,  by  an  appeal  to  some 
kind  or  another  of  love — to  filial  love,  to  motherly  love, 
to  the  associated  love  of  friendship,  to  the  high  and 
sacred  love  between  a  maiden  and  her  lover,  to  the  nat- 
ural love  which  without  particular  direction  arises  out 
of  pity  for  the  helpless,  and  to  the  love  we  feel  for  the 
natural  world.  Thus  the  various  questions  that  issue 
out  of  the  main  question,  and  the  main  question  itself, 
are  answered  by   showing   what  love   would    naturally 


t64  Tennyson 

reply.  Now  the  effects  of  true  love  are  always  beauti- 
ful, and  he  who  represents  them  with  love  and  joy 
embodies  beauty. 

So  Tennyson  made  the  woman's  question  lovely.  But 
he  was  so  exalted  by  this  abiding  in  love  that  he  could 
not  help  at  times  in  the  poem  breaking  out  into  lyric 
songs,  in  which  he  might  express  a  keener  feeling  of 
beauty,  and  reach  a  higher  range  of  poetry  than  in  tlie 
rest  of  the  poem,  Avhere  the  subject  forbade  him  to  rise 
above  a  certain  level.  So  he  wrote  in  the  midst  of  the 
poem  two  love-songs,  one  of  the  sorrow  of  love  past  by 
for  ever,  of  the  days  that  are  no  more  ;  another  of 
the  joyful  hope  of  love,  of  the  days  that  were  to  come. 
The  first  of  these,  Tears,  idle  tears,  as  I  have  already 
said,  represents  more  nearly  than  any  of  the  songs  of 
Tennyson,  but  chiefly  in  the  last  verse,  one  phase,  at 
least,  of  the  passion  of  love  between  man  and  woman. 
It  does  not  represent  its  enjoyment,  but  the  wild  regret 
of  its  continued  existence  in  unfulfilment.  The  three 
verses  which  lead  up  to  this  intense  climax  with  slow 
and  soft  approaches  are  drenched  through  and  through, 
more  than  any  other  regretful  song  I  know,  more  even 
than  any  of  Shelley's  songs,  in  the  heavy  dew  of  long 
and  living  sorrow  for  love  just  touched  but   unattained. 

The  Princess  hears  the  song  and  calls  its  tone  to  order. 

If  indeed  there  haunt 
About  the  moulder'd  lodges  of  the  past 
So  sweet  a  voice  and  vague,  fatal  to  men, 
Well  needs  it  we  should  cram  our  ears  with  wool 
And  so  pass  by. 


The  Princess  165 

Then  rising  on  a  wave  of  hope  and  effort,  she  bids 
her  girls  sail  on  to  the  great  year  to  come,  and  m  one  of 
the  noblest  similes  in  the  poem,  Tennyson  pamts  the 
disappearance  of  the  mightiest  ideas  of  the  past  m  the 
warm  life  of  the  future. 

While  down  the  streams  that  float  us  each  and  all 
To  the  issue,  goes,  like  glittering  bergs  of  ice, 
Throne  after  throne,  and  molten  on  the  waste 
Becomes  a  cloud. 
At  this  the  Prince,  emboldened,  sings  of  hope  in  love  ; 
a  mere  love  poem  the  Princess  calls  it,  in  her  fresh  dis- 
dain     ''  Great  is  song,"  she  says,  "  used  to  great  ends  '  ; 
"duer  unto  freedom,  force,  and  growth  of  spirit  than  to 
junketing  and  love,"  phrases  which  represent  Tennyson's 
own  view,  in  certain  moods,  of  the  aim  of  Poetry.     Yet 
the  song   is  lovely  in  movement;  its  wing-beatmg  and 
swift-glancing  verse  is  like  the  flight  of  the  bird  that  has 
suggested  it. 

O  Swallow,  Swallow,  flying,  flying  south. 

Both  songs  are  unrhymed,  yet  no  one  needs  the  rhyme, 
so  harmoniously  is  their  assonance  arranged,  not^  so 
much  at  the  end  of  each  line  as  in  the  body  of  the  hnes 
themselves.  Tears,  idle  tears  is  a  masterpiece  of  the 
careful  employment  of  vowels. 

The  song  of  triumph  which  Ida  sings  is  also  un- 
rhymed The  comparison  of  the  cause  of  woman  to 
a  tree  is  too  elaborate  in  detail,  and  is  not  throughout 
well  developed,  but  the  last  verse  has  its  own  splendour, 
and  the  tree  becomes  a  Universe-tree. 


1 66  Tennyson 

Our  enemies  have  fall'n,  but  this  shall  grow, 
A  night  of  summer  from  the  heat,  a  breadth 
Of  autumn,  dropping  fruits  of  power  ;  and  roll'd 
With  music  in  the  growing  breeze  of  Time, 
The  tops  shall  strike  from  star  to  star,  the  fangs 
Shall  move  the  stony  bases  of  the  world. 

The  last  song  in  the  body  of  the  poem  : 

Now  sleeps  the  crimson  petal,  now  the  white  : 

is  Still  unrhymed,  and  might  be  called  the  palace-song 
of  love,  so  full  is  it  with  the  rich  and  lovely  things  which 
belong  to  the  royal  gardens  of  the  earth,  when  night  in 
a  clear  sky  has  fallen  on  them.  But  of  itself,  the  song 
and  the  love  in  it  are  not  of  much  worth. 

When  Tennyson,  however,  had  read  over  what  he  had 
done,  the  overwhelming  mastery  of  love,  of  love  of  every 
kind,  which  fills  the  poem,  urged  him  to  new  creation, 
and  he  celebrates  love  in  six  of  its  various  phases — in 
six  delightful  and  happy  songs,  inserted  in  the  third 
edition  between  the  main  divisions  of  the  poem.  They 
were,  he  says,  ballads  or  songs  to  give  the  poets  breath- 
ing space.     So 

The  women  sang 
Between  the  rougher  voices  of  the  men, 
Like  linnets  in  the  pauses  of  the  wind. 

They  are  all  of  a  sweet  and  gentle  humanity,  of  a  fasci- 
nating and  concentrated  brevity,  of  common  moods  of 
human  love  made  by  the  poet's  sympathy  and  art  to 
shine  like  the  common  stars  we  love  so  well.  The  fall- 
ing out  of  wife  and  husband  reconciled  over  the  grave 


The  Princess  167 

of  their  child,  the  mother  singing  to  her  babe  of  his 
father  coming  home  from  sea,  the  warrior  in  battle 
thinking  of  his  home,  the  iron  grief  of  the  soldier's  wife 
melted  at  last  into  tears  by  his  child  laid  upon  her  knee, 
the  maiden  yielding  at  last  to  love  she  had  kept  at  bay— 
these  are  the  simple  subjects  of  these  songs.  They 
please  this  large  poet,  he  was  at  home  in  them,  and  as 
long  as  human  nature  lasts  they  will  please  the  world, 
because  they  will  endear  love  to  the  world. 
Among  these  the  cradle  song. 

Sweet  and  low,  sweet  and  low, 
Wind  of  the  western  sea, 

is  the  most  beautiful  and  writes,  as  it  were,  its  own 
music,  but  the  song, 

The  splendour  falls  on  castle  walls, 
And  snowy  summits  old  in  story, 

is  the  noblest,  a  clear,  uplifted,  softly-ringing  song.  It 
sings,  in  its  short  compass,  of  four  worlds,  of  ancient 
chivalry,  of  wild  nature,  of  romance  where  the  horns  of 
Elfland  blow,  and  of  the  greater  future  of  mankind. 
And  in  singing  of  the  last,  it  touches  the  main  subject 
of  love,  love  not  of  person  to  person,  but  of  each  life 
to  all  the  lives  that  follow  it  : 

Our  echoes  roll  from  soul  to  soul, 
Ard  grow  for  ever  and  for  ever. 

Yet  it  is  the  lover  who  tells  this  to  his  SAveetheart,  and 
the  universal  element  is  made  delicate  by  its  union  with 


1 68 


Tennyson 


the  personal  love  of  these  two  happy  creatures.  It  is 
well  that  the  soul  of  man  should  enter  into  the  close  of 
the  song,  but  the  greatest  poetical  beauty  has  been 
reached  in  the  second  verse,  where  by  a  magical  employ- 
ment of  words  the  whole  world  of  Elfland  is  created, 
and  with  it  all  the  romantic  tales  echo  in  the  ear. 

These  are  the  songs  of  this  delightful  poem,  and  it  is 
with  some  difficulty  that  we  turn  away  from  them  to 
speak  of  the  way  in  which  Tennyson  has  treated  the 
social  side  of  his  subject.  It  seems  necessary,  however, 
to  discuss  for  a  little  time  his  views  of  the  woman's 
question. 


w 


CHAPTER   VI 

THE    PRINCESS   {Continued) 

THE    woman's   question 

HEN,   in  Locksley  Hall,  Tennyson   makes   his 
hero,  in  his  anger,  cry 


Weakness  to  be  wroth  with  weakness !  woman's  pleasure,  woman's 

pain — 
Nature  made  them  blinder  motions  bounded  in  a  shallower  brain  ; 
Woman  is  the  lesser  man, 

it  appears  as  if  the  woman's  question  had  already  occu- 
pied his  mind.  It  continued  to  dwell  with  him,  for 
in  Edwin  Morris,  a  poem  published  four  years  after 
The  Princess,  the  curate,  Edward  Bull,  who  was  fatter 
than  his  cure,  answers  his  friend,  a  poet,  to  whom  his 
sweetheart's 

least  remark  was  worth 
The  experience  of  the  wise, 

that  this  idealising  of  the  woman  was  all  nonsense. 

"  I  take  it,"  said  he 

God  made  the  woman  for  the  man, 
And  for  the  good  and  increase  of  the  world. 
169 


170  Tennyson 

A  pretty  face  is  well,  and  this  is  well, 
To  have  a  dame  indoors,  that  trims  us  up, 
And  keeps  us  tight :  but  these  unreal  ways 
Seem  but  the  theme  of  writers,  and  indeed 
Worn  threadbare.     Man  is  made  of  solid  stuff. 
I  say,  God  made  the  woman  for  the  man. 
And  for  the  good  and  increase  of  the  world. 

This  is  a  more  Philistine  opinion  concerning  the  object 
of  a  woman's  life  than  even  those  held  by  the  kings  in 
The  Princess.  Tennyson  did  not  agree  with  that  view 
being  exhaustive  : 

"  Parson,"  said  I,  "  you  pitch  the  pipe  too  low  ! " 

At  what  note  he  wished  the  pipe  pitched,  we  hear  in 
The  Princess ;  and  I  write  throughout  of  the  poem  as  it 
was  finished  in  editions  subsequent  to  that  published 
in  1847. 

The  subject  is  introduced  in  the  Prologue.  A  story 
is  read  of  a  feudal  heroine  of  Sir  Walter's  house  (in 
whose  grounds  the  company  are  met  who  make  the 
poem),  who  rather  than  yield  to  the  wild  will  of  a  king, 
took  arms  and  conquered  him.  "Where  lives,"  asks 
one,  "  such  a  woman  now  ? "  And  Lilia,  Sir  Walter's 
daughter,  replies  : 

"  There  are  thousands  now 
Such  women,  but  convention  beats  them  down  ; 
It  is  but  bringing  up  ;  no  more  than  that  : 
You  men  have  done  it  ;  how  I  hate  you  all ! 

O  I  wish 
That  I  were  some  great  princess,  I  would  build 


The  Princess  171 


Far  off  from  men  a  college  like  a  man's, 

And  I  would  teach  them  all  that  men  are  taught ; 

We  are  twice  as  quick  ! 

But  I  would  make  it  death 
For  any  male  thing  but  to  peep  at  us." 

The  whole  question  (as  Tennyson  told  it  from  the 
woman's  side)  is  there  laid  down  ;  and  out  of  Lilia's 
wish  grows  the  tale.  Her  view  is  the  same  as  that  of 
Ida,  the  Princess.  When  Ida,  however,  was  young,  she 
dreamt  that  the  man  was  equal  to  the  woman,  but  that 
each  was  the  half  of  the  other,  that  each  fulfilled  defect 
in  each,  and  that  together  they  became  the  perfect 
being.  This  is  the  view  of  the  Prince  at  the  end  of  the 
book,  and  Ida  says  the  dream  was  once  hers.  But  when 
we  find  her  at  the  beginning  of  the  poem,  this  is  not  her 
view.  Women  have  been  made  either  toys  or  slaves  by 
men  !  Their  will,  their  faculties,  their  very  characters, 
have  been  lost  in  those  of  men  ;  their  weakness  taken 
advantage  of,  their  ignorance  encouraged  that  they  may 
be  kept  in  subjection.  "Women  have  been  great,"  she 
cries  with  indignation,  "  great  in  war,  great  in  govern- 
ment, great  in  science,  great  in  the  work  of  the  world. 
Why  should  they  not  always  be  as  great  ?  I  will  make 
it  so.    They  shall  be 

living  wills,  and  sphered 
Whole  in  themselves,  and  owed  to  none." 

She  sees  thus  both  types  of  womanhood,  the  enslaved 
and  the  free  ;  but  she  sees  only  one  type  of  men  in  their 
relation  to  women — those  who  treat   them   "  either   as 


172  Tennyson 

vassals  to  be  beaten  or  pretty  babes  to  be  dandled."  It 
was  not  wise  for  the  sake  of  her  cause  to  be  thus  one- 
sighted.  It  began  the  battle  by  taking  up  a  position  on 
half  a  truth.  She  did  wrong  to  set  aside  as  unworthy, 
or  to  be  angry  with,  the  opinions  of  those  men  who 
either  idealised  women,  or  said  that  they  were  the 
equals  of  men,  but  in  dissimilar  qualities.  It  was  part 
of  her  theory  of  isolation  to  despise  all  the  views  of  men 
on  her  sex,  good  and  bad  alike  ;  and  this  foolish  con- 
tempt is  even  now  one  of  the  reasons  for  the  failure  or 
the  slow  advance  of  the  cause  of  woman. 

She  makes  two  more  mistakes.  What  do  women 
need,  she  asks,  to  level  them  with  man  ?  They  want 
nothing  but  knowledge.  Equality  of  knowledge  will 
equalise  them  with  men.  And  that  they  may  gain  this 
knowledge,  even  be  free  to  gain  it,  there  is  only  one  way 
— isolation  from  man.  The  thing  needed  and  the 
way  to  win  it  are  thus  both  laid  down,  and  both  are 
mistakes,  then  and  now. 

So  the  college  is  established.  Here,  she  says,  the 
women  shall  be  moulded  to  the  fuller  day  ;  and  then, 
when  the  girls  are  trained  at  all  points  as  men  are 
trained  ;  then,  when  the  secular  emancipation  of  half 
the  world  will  have  been  wrought,  why  then,  afterwards, 
let  women  marry — and  everywhere  shall  be 

Two  heads  in  council,  two  beside  the  hearth, 
Two  in  the  tangled  business  of  the  world, 
Two  in  the  liberal  offices  of  life, 
Two  plummets  dropt  from  one  to  sound  the  abyss 


The  Princess  173 

Of  science,  and  the  secrets  of  the  mind  ; 
Musician,  painter,  sculptor,  critic,  more  ; 
And  everywhere  the  broad  and  bounteous  earth 
Shall  bear  a  double  growth  of  those  rare  souls. 
Poets,  whose  thoughts  enrich  the  blood  of  the  world. 

But  at  present,  till  the  work  be  done,  death  to  the 
man  who  enters  the  college  gates.  "  Let  there  be  no 
love  yet  between  man  and  maid.  For  there  lies  our 
weakness — in  our  leaning  to  tenderness,  in  our  personal 
cry  for  love.  I,  for  one,  will  never  wed."  "  What," 
says  the  Prince,  "  have  neither  love,  children,  happi- 
ness, what  every  woman  counts  her  due?"  "Love?" 
she  answers,  "  I  have  left  its  feeble  fancy  behind  me. 
Children  ?  Would  that  they  grew  like  flowers — and  yet, 
in  our  love  of  them,  we  lose  the  higher  things.  They 
kill  us  with  pity  break  us  with  ourselves .'  "  She  feels  in 
that  phrase  her  great  difficulty — that  Nature  is  against 
her — feels  it,  but  does  not  realise  it.  She  dreads  her 
own  womanhood.  Yet,  she  sees  no  other  way  of  action  ; 
isolation  from  man  is  necessary  to  re-establish  the  just 
equality  of  woman.  This  is  her  position,  and  it  includes 
a  denial  of  natural  love  which  smacks  of  Lady  Blanche, 
the  grim,  disappointed  woman  whom  Tennyson  creates 
in  order  to  motive  Ida's  exclusion  of  natural  affection 
from  her  plan.  We  excuse  then  what  was  foolish  in 
Ida's  effort  ;  it  is  not  wholly  her  fault — but  at  the  same 
time  we  lose  some  of  our  respect  for  her  intelligence. 
For  to  deliberately  knock  her  head  against  the  certain- 
ties, to  believe  that  they  are  not  certainties  and  can  be 
dodged,  is  the  greatest  of  follies.     To  ignore  love  between 


174  Tennyson 

the  sexes  is  one  of  the  little  games  some  women  play 
in  the  battle  for  their  rights.  On  the  contrary,  one 
of  the  axioms  they  ought  to  lay  down  in  the  planning 
of  their  struggle  is  that  this  kind  of  love  is  certain  to 
arise. 

This  union  made  by  love  is  not  the  only  union 
which  ought  to  exist  between  man  and  woman.  All  the 
work  of  the  world  ought  to  be  done  by  both  of  the 
sexes  in  harmonious  and  equal  co-operation,  each  sex 
taking  what  fits  best  its  hand.  Without  this  union  the 
world's  work  is  only  half  done.  And  with  regard  to 
the  woman's  cause  itself,  it  can  make  no  progress  as 
long  as  the  law  that  in  all  work  both  sexes  should  labour 
together  is  disobeyed.  In  obedience  to  that  law,  which 
Tennyson  in  this  book  meant  to  dwell  upon  (at  least  so 
far  as  regards  the  aim  of  the  Princess),  the  proper  and 
successful  conduct  of  the  woman's  cause  is  everywhere 
contained.  Women  sometimes  deny  this,  and  try  to 
carry  out  their  aims  independent  of  men,  I  do  not 
wonder  that  they  make  the  effort,  for  men  have  long 
shut  out  women  from  any  active  share  in  a  great  num- 
ber of  their  ends,  isolating  women  in  home  alone. 
None,  indeed,  have  violated  more  than  men  the  law 
which  is  here  laid  down.  In  that  has  lain  the  most  cry- 
ing mistake  of  civilisation.  Owing  to  that  disobedience 
the  whole  progress  of  humanity  has  made  only  half  the 
way  it  would  otherwise  have  done.  Government,  law, 
religion,  literature,  art,  commerce,  science  of  all  kinds, 
social    order    and    progress,  national   and  international 


The  Princess  175 

union,  are  all  only  developed  to  half  the  excellence 
they  would  have  reached,  had  women  shared  in  them  as 
co-workers  with  men.  But  the  more  women  believe  that 
this  is  true,  the  more  foolish  it  would  be  for  them,  for 
the  sake  of  a  petty  vengeance  or  a  personal  pique,  to 
perpetrate,  even  at  one  single  point,  the  same  folly — to 
isolate  their  work  from  men  as  men  have  isolated  their 
work  from  women  in  the  past.  On  the  contrary — 
always  together,  as  Nature  means.  Tennyson  saw  this 
up  to  a  certain  point,  and  now  and  again  in  this  poem 
seems  to  infer  the  whole  of  it.  But  he  did  not  really  go 
so  far.  He  seems  to  keep  himself  within  equality  in 
married  life.  But  his  principle  goes  beyond  that  sphere. 
Day  by  day  his  limits  fade  away. 

This,  then,  was  Ida's  first  mistake — isolation  of  woman 
from  man.  The  second  was  that  she  thought  knowledge 
alone  was  enough  to  lift  woman  into  equality  with  man, 
to  rescue  her  from  her  position  as  toy  or  slave.  Knowl- 
edge, of  course,  is  good  ;  the  more  knowledge  women 
get  the  better.  It  is  an  absolute  necessity.  But  alone  it 
injures  more  than  assists  their  cause.  It  does  part  of 
their  work  ;  it  cannot  possibly  do  all.  It  can  destroy 
the  opinions  which  make  women  dolls  to  be  played  with 
or  vassals  to  be  exploited.  It  can  supply  them  with  the 
tools  necessary  to  carve  their  way  upwards,  to  take  up 
the  works  that  men  assume  as  only  theirs  ;  but  it  cannot 
supply  the  spirit  which  feels  the  right  way  to  do  these 
things  ;  it  cannot  create  the  imaginative  or  spiritual 
powers  which  illuminate    or   kindle   work  :    nor  can  it 


1 76  Tennyson 

enable  womanhood  to  guard  her  own  nature  from  its 
excesses  or  defects.  By  itself,  it  is  weak,  save  to  destroy 
ignorance  or  prejudice.  And  by  itself,  it  has  its  own 
prejudices,  its  own  blindness.  Worst  of  all,  it  has  its 
own  vanity,  and  the  vanity  of  knowledge  is  the  most 
successful  corrupter  and  overthrower  of  the  noble 
causes  for  which  mankind  has  fought  and  suffered.  If 
this  vanity  of  knowledge  should  prevail  among  women 
(and  they  are  peculiarly  liable  to  it)  their  cause  will 
break  up,  the  positions  they  have  won  will  be  lost.  One 
of  its  tendencies,  when  women  think  that  knowledge  is 
all  they  need,  is  to  lead  them  to  deny  or  minimise  the 
radical  difference  of  sex  on  which  Tennyson  dwells  so 
much.  It  is  an  astonishing  piece  of  folly.  Only  women 
could  have  the  audacity  to  contradict  one  of  the  prime- 
val facts  of  the  universe.  It  is  a  case  where  the  vanity 
of  knowledge  devours  knowledge  itself. 

Again,  when  knowledge,  full  of  its  self-admiration, 
neglects  or  denies  the  imagination,  the  affections,  the 
sentiment  of  life  ;  when  it  passes  by  beauty  as  of  no  im- 
portance and  looks  on  the  ideal  faiths  of  man  as  folly — 
there  is  nothing  which  is  so  certain  to  take  the  wrong 
road,  and  to  ruin  the  cause  it  boasts  that  it  supports. 
Any  one  of  the  emotional,  imaginative,  and  spiritual 
powers  of  nature  directs  and  moves  personal  and  collec- 
tive human  life  more  than  the  intellectual  power  directed 
to  the  objects  of  knowledge.  With  all  their  tendency  to 
run  into  extremes  these  powers  are  safer  guides  than 
mere  knowledge  in  the  affairs  of  daily  life  and  in  the 


The  Princess  177 

working  of  great  human  causes.  Each  of  them — emo- 
tional, imaginative,  or  spiritual — needs  knowledge,  and 
to  let  any  one  of  them  act  without  knowledge  is  as  fool- 
ish as  to  let  knowledge  act  without  them.  But  even 
when  one  of  them  does  act  alone,  it  does  not  do  quite  as 
much  harm  to  the  progress  of  humanity  as  knowledge 
does,  when  it  isolates  itself  in  its  pride  as  the  only  mas- 
ter of  action  or  the  only  guide  of  thought. 

And  many  women  in  the  present  day  seem  to  look 
with  a  certain  contempt  on  sentiment,  on  imagination, 
on  beauty  and  art,  on  the  affections,  on  the  high  pas- 
sions of  the  ideal  or  of  the  religious  life.  It  is  a  fatal 
pride,  and  a  folly  for  which  they  will  sorely  suffer. 
Women  do  not  want  less  emotion  but  larger  emotion, 
nobler  and  less  personal  direction  of  emotion  ;  more  of 
love  and  not  less,  more  true  passion  and  not  less  ;  more 
sense  of  beauty  and  not  less  ;  more  imagination,  more 
of  the  energy  of  faith  working  by  love,  more  sacrifice  of 
self,  that  is,  more  universal,  less  particular  sacrifice. 
Education  in  these  they  want  above  all,  and  they  want 
it  at  present  more  than  men. 

These,  then,  were  the  two  great  errors  into  which  the 
Princess  fell,  and  they  defeated  her  cause.  And  this  is 
the  main  meaning  of  Tennyson. 

The  college  is  broken  up  first  by  the  love  of  a  man  to 
a  maid.  Death  stands  before  the  Prince,  but  the  danger 
emboldens  him. 

Over  rocks  that  are  steepest 
Love  will  find  out  the  way. 


1 78  Tennyson 

What  are  isolations  to  that  overwhelming  conqueror  ! 
Love  blows  his  trumpet,  and  the  walls  of  the  college  fall 
down. 

Secondly,  it  is  broken  up  by  feminine  jealousy,  Ida 
neglects  Lady  Blanche  for  Psyche,  a  younger  friend, 
one  nearer  her  heart,  and  the  clashing  of  these  two 
(owing  to  the  Princess  following  her  affection)  disinte- 
grates the  college.  The  sketch  of  this  little  in-and-out 
of  feeling  is  no  doubt  intended  by  Tennyson  to  illustrate 
a  danger  which  does  not  indeed  belong  only  to  the 
woman's  question.  Jealousies  and  personal  claims  of 
the  sort  made  by  Lady  Blanche,  personal  affections  like 
that  of  the  Princess  which  neglect  some  comrades  and 
favour  others,  personal  feelings  of  any  kind  pushed 
athwart  the  cause — with  their  envies,  their  pettiness, 
even  their  malignancies,  their  party  preferences,  their 
claims  for  office,  their  dwelling  on  small  points  which 
men  or  women  make  into  important  things  in  order  to 
fix  attention  on  themselves — these  are  the  worms  which 
eat  into  the  heart  of  great  causes  and  rot  away  the  finest 
plans.  Women  are  even  more  subject  to  these  faults 
than  men — not  that  men  are  naturally  better,  but  women 
have  not  had  that  public  training  which  men  have  had 
in  the  repression  of  the  personal  and  all  its  stupidities. 

Thirdly,  the  march  of  events  breaks  up  the  college. 
The  college  has  isolated  itself  from  the  general  work 
of  the  world.  Whenever  a  movement  does  that,  it  is 
certain  to  be  walked  over  and  crushed  by  the  general 
movement.     Events  come  knocking  at  its   doors — and 


The  Princess  179 


the  gates  break  down  under  the  pressure.  The  repre- 
sentation of  this  is  one  of  the  most  skilful  things  that 
Tennyson  has  done  in  this  poem.  And  it  will  never  do 
for  the  leaders  of  the  woman's  movement  to  isolate  it. 
It  must  take  part  in  affairs  other  than  its  own,  bring 
them  into  itself,  fit  itself  to  events  and  events  to  it — 
harmonise  itself  with  all  the  forward  forces  round  about 
it.  Otherwise  it  will  be  dissolved  and  have  to  crystallise 
all  over  again. 

It  is  not  only  the  college  which  is  dissolved.  The 
Princess  herself  is  broken  down,  and  at  every  point 
this  is  done  by  the  recurrence  of  the  natural  emotions 
from  which  she  has  tried  to  free  her  heart  lest  they 
should  weaken  her  will.  Nature  expelled  returns  all 
armed.  Ida  keeps  the  child  of  Pysche  with  her  in  the 
college — that  is,  she  keeps  with  her  an  impulse  to  the 
motherhood  she  has  abjured.  She  cannot  give  up  the 
child  to  its  mother.  True  sympathy  with  her  own  sex 
would  not  permit  her  to  be  guilty  of  so  great  a  want  of 
nature  ;  yet,  along  with  this  unnatural  hardness,  she 
is  softened  by  the  child's  silent  appeal  to  her  woman- 
hood : 

"  I  took  it  for  an  hour  in  mine  own  bed 
This  morning  ;  there  the  tender  orphan  hands 
Felt  at  my  heart,  and  seem'd  to  charm  from  thence 
The  wrath  I  nursed  against  the  world." 

Her  soul,  it  is  plain,  is  now  a  kingdom  divided  against 
itself.  It  cannot  stand.  But  when  Cyril  appeals  to  her 
to  give  it  back  to  the  mother,  all  the  woman  surges  up  ; 


i8o  Tennyson 

she  kisses  it,  and  feels  that  "  her  heart  is  barren,"  and 
we  hear  in  the  phrase  the  regret  of  her  life  for  the 
motherhood  she  has  abandoned.  Then  she  passes  by 
the  wounded  Prince,  and  his  old  father,  his  beard  dab- 
bled in  his  son's  blood,  points  to  her  hair  and  picture  on 
his  heart.     She  thinks  of  his  love  ;  and  all 

Her  iron  will  was  broken  in  her  mind. 
Her  noble  heart  was  molten  in  her  breast. 

"  Give  him  to  me,"  she  cries,  "to  tend  in  the  palace." 
Then  she  finds  her  friend  Psyche,  who  begs  forgiveness 
for  her  flight  from  the  college.  At  first,  rapt  in  the  child, 
she  does  not  answer.  Her  brother,  who  has  fought  for 
her,  cannot  understand  her  hardness  : 

"  Ida — 'sdeath  !     You  blame  the  man  ; 
You  wrong  yourselves — the  woman  is  so  hard 
Upon  the  woman." 

Her  father  cries  out  at  her  :  "  No  heart  have  you." 
The  father  of  the  Prince  breaks  out  : 

"  Woman,  whom  we  thought  woman  even  now, 
And  were  half-fool'd  to  let  you  tend  our  son. 
Because  he  might  have  wish'd  it — but  we  see 
The  accomplice  of  your  madness  unforgiven  ; 

the  rougher  hand 
Is  safer  :  on  to  the  tents  ;  take  up  the  Prince." 

Step  by  step,  natural  love  invades  her  will,  love  of 
children,  pity  for  the  man  who  loves  her,  love  of  her 
friend  : 

The  touch  of  that  which  kills  her  with  herself 


The  Princess  i8i 

drags  her  from  her  isolation.  Finally,  she  throws  open 
the  whole  college  in  pity  of  the  wounded  and  in  per- 
sonal indignation  with  Lady  Blanche.  Whatever  man 
lies  wounded,  friend  or  foe, 

Shall  enter,  if  he  will.     Let  our  girls  flit 
Till  the  storm  die. 

The  same  action  of  natural  love  besets  and  conquers 
Psyche.  She  will  not  betray  her  brother  to  death,  and 
forgets  her  oath,  and  she  clung 

About  him,  and  betwixt  them  blossom'd  up 

From  out  a  common  vein  of  memory 

Sweet  household  talk  and  phrases  of  the  hearth. 

Melissa    does    not   bear  that    heart    within  her  breast, 
To  give  three  gallant  gentlemen  to  death  ; 

and  all  the  mob  of  girls  cry,  when  the  hour  is  stormy, 
that  their  May  is  passing — that  love,  children,  ruling  of 
a  house  are  far  from  them — that  men  hate  learned 
women.  Theirs  is  the  vulgar  cry,  but  it  is  forced  on 
them  by  an  isolation  which  denies  nature.  And  the 
vulgarity  passes  away  when  they  tend  the  wounded, 
when  pity  and  tenderness  are  allowed  full  scope,  when 
love  is  born  in  the  college  glades.  Thus,  the  natural 
affections  break  down  the  Princess  and  her  plan. 

This  main  contention  in  the  poem  is  mixed  up  with 
a  concise  representation  of  the  common  prejudices  of 
men  concerning  the  work  of  women.  Different  char- 
acters represent  different  opinions.     The  father  of  the 


1 82  Tennyson 

Princess,  King  Gama,  lets  things  slide.  "  I  let  Ida  have 
her  way,"  he  says  ;  "  it  did  not  matter  to  me.  I  wanted 
peace  and  no  dispute.  Let  my  daughter  play  her  game." 
This  indifferent,  half-contemptuous  treatment  of  the 
earnestness  of  women  by  the  man,  mingled  with  an 
irritating  profession  of  love  for  them,  is  not  unknown 
to  the  women  of  the  present  day. 

Then  there  is  the  rough  old  King,  the  father  of  the 
Prince.  He  is  the  image  of  the  savage  view  come  down 
to  modern  times.  Ida's  opinions  of  her  sex  and  its 
work  are  rampant  heresy  to  him.  "  Look  you,  sir,"  he 
breaks  out, 

"  Man  is  the  hunter  :  woman  is  his  game  ; " 

and  the  lines  which  follow  put  this  opinion  with  admira- 
ble bluntness. 

Cyril,  bold,  reckless,  and  honourable,  the  lover  of  the 
sex,  represents  another  type.  When  he  hears  the  wo- 
men lecture,  and  the  Prince  says  "  They  do  all  this  as 
well  as  we," 

"  They  hunt  old  trails,"  said  Cyril,  "  very  well : 
But  when  did  woman  ever  yet  invent  ?  " 

"  What  is  all  this  learning  to  me  ?  I  looked  on  Psyche, 
and  she  made  me  wise  in  another  way.  I  learnt  more 
from  her  in  a  flash  than  if  every  Muse  tumbled  a  sci- 
ence into  my  empty  brain.  Love  has  come  in  with  me 
into  the  college,  and  I  have  thought  to  roar,  to  break  my 
chain,  and  shake  my  mane."  This  is  the  natural  man, 
who  thinks  that  love  is  all,  who,  when  he  loves,  idealises 


The  Princess  183 

the  woman  into  the  teacher  of  things  which  no  knowl- 
edge can  give  him,  but  who  always  thinks  that  his  man's 
strength  is  the  natural  victor  over  the  woman.  Yet,  he 
it  is  whom  Tennyson  chooses  to  put  his  main  conten- 
tion. Cyril  loves  Psyche,  and  begs  the  Princess  to  give 
back  the  child.  He  has  no  theories,  no  ideal  of  wo- 
man's future  ;  but  he  stands  for  Nature  and  for  love. 

O  fair  and  strong  and  terrible  !     Lioness 
That  with  your  long  locks  play  the  lion's  mane  ! 
But  Love  and  Nature,  these  are  two  more  terrible 
And  stronger. 

These  are  the  main  male  opinions  about  women  which 
Tennyson  embodied.  That  of  the  Prince  remains,  and 
he  represents  Tennyson's  full  thought  upon  the  matter. 
After  the  battle,  the  Prince  and  the  Princess  are  face  to 
face.  And  the  pity  of  his  long  illness,  in  which  she  has 
nursed  him  tenderly,  "  and  hatred  of  her  weakness,  blent 
with  shame,"  and  sight  of  all  the  lovers  in  court  and 
grove,  and  constant  usage  of  the  charities  of  life,  and 
softening  sadness,  change  her  whole  soul  to  gentleness 
and  pity,  and  both  at  last  to  love.  And  when  the  Prince 
awakes  to  consciousness,  and  thinking  her  who  sits 
beside  him  some  sweet  dream,  calls  her  to  fulfil  the 
dream  to  perfection  and  kiss  him  ere  he  die,  she  stoops 
and  kisses  him,  and  all 

Her  falser  self  slipt  from  her  like  a  robe 
And  left  her  woman. 

When  in  the  night  he  wakes  again  and  hears  Ida  read- 
ing a  song  that  strikes  the  note  of  that  which  is  to  be 


1 84  Tennyson 

their  life,  they  speak  together  of  all  that  has  been. 
"  She  was  wrong,"  she  says,  "  she  had  failed,  had  sought 
less  for  truth  than  power  in  knoAvledge,  but  something 
wild  within  her  breast, 

A  greater  than  all  knowledge,  beat  her  down. 

For  the  moment,  no  doubt — the  moment  of  her  pas- 
sionate yielding — she  does  not  surrender  too  much. 
But  she  surrenders  too  much  if  she  speaks  as  a  woman 
for  women.  And  the  Prince,  with  all  his  views  of  pure 
equality,  accepts  too  much  of  masterhood.  There  is  a 
certain  lordliness  in  his  lecture  on  the  woman  and  the 
man  which  belongs  to  Tennyson's  attitude  on  the  sub- 
ject, and  which  makes  me  dread  that  Ida  in  after  years 
lost  a  good  deal  of  her  individuality.  This  might  be  a 
gain  for  the  comfort  of  the  palace,  but  it  would  be  a 
loss  to  womanhood  and  to  the  world.  But  what  the 
Prince  says,  independent  of  his  attitude  of  mind,  is  true, 
for  the  most  part,  to  the  heart  of  the  question,  and 
remains  true,  even  though  fifty  years  have  passed  away. 
But  we  have  now  far  more  data  to  go  upon  than 
Tennyson  possessed.  The  steady  work  of  women  dur- 
ing these  fifty  years,  and  the  points  they  have  so  bravely 
won,  have  added  element  after  element  to  our  expe- 
rience. But  all  that  has  been  gained  has  made  more 
plain  that 

The  woman's  cause  is  man's  :  they  rise  or  sink 
Together. 

One  is  the  equal  half  of  the  other  ;  and  the  halves  are 


The  Princess  185 


diverse  for  ever,  each  complements  each  ;  both  united 
in  diversity  make  the  perfect  humanity  ;  their  work 
must  be  together,  in  difference.  These  are  the  vital 
truths  which  Tennyson  expresses  in  the  famous  lines 
of  the  Prince's  speech,  and  they  govern,  or  ought  to 
govern,  the  whole  question  of  the  future  position  of 
womanhood  in  a  better  society  than  that  in  which  we 
live.  They  do  not  govern  the  position  or  the  life  of 
womanhood  at  present.  The  prejudices  both  of  men 
and  women  are  against  their  full  development.  Nor 
do  I  think  that  Tennyson  himself  (save  on  a  wind  of 
prophecy)  saw  clearly  to  what  conclusions  his  own  views 
would  lead.  We  could  not  expect  he  should,  but  men 
and  women  will  in  the  end  grasp  with  proper  largeness 
of  thought  what  this  means  : 

And  so  these  twain,  upon  the  skirts  of  Time 
Sit  side  by  side,  full  summ'd  in  all  their  powers, 
Dispensing  harvest,  sowing  the  To-be, 
Self-reverent  each  and  reverencing  each, 
Distinct  in  individualities, 
But  like  each  other  ev'n  as  those  who  love. 

These  verses  assert  far  more  for  women  than  that  they 
should  find  their  only  perfect  life  in  marriage  and  in 
home  ;  their  only  exercise  of  sacrifice  in  motherhood, 
in  nursing  the  sick,  in  tending  on  the  poor,  or  their  only 
career  in  personal  devotion  to  those  they  love.  Tenny- 
son, sometimes  seeing  farther,  comes  back  to  circle 
round  these  things  of  home  alone  ;  and  most  men  and 
women,    even    now,    think    that   these    exhaust    all    the 


1 86  Tennyson 

womanly  work  of  women.  It  is  not  so.  We  have  gained 
a  wider  view.  To  be,  indeed,  a  true  wife,  such  as 
Tennyson  has  drawn  on  the  lips  of  the  Prince  ;  or  to  be 
a  sweet  and  noble  mother,  one 

N  t  learned,  save  in  gracious  household  ways, 
Not  perfect,  nay,  but  full  of  tender  wants, 
No  angel,  but  a  dearer  being,  all  dipt 
In  angel  instincts,  breathing  Paradise, 
Interpreter  between  the  gods  and  men. 
Who  look'd  all  native  to  her  place,  and  yet 
On  tiptoe  seem'd  to  touch  upon  a  sphere 
Too  gross  to  tread,  and  all  male  minds  perforce 
Sway'd  to  her  from  their  orbits  as  they  moved 
And  girdled  her  with  music.     Happy  he. 
With  such  a  mother  ! 

— to  be  these  noble  creatures  at  home,  and  to  build  up 
children  into  noble  life — this,  indeed,  is  the  work  of 
womanhood  done  not  only  at  home,  but  for  the  State 
and  for  humanity  at  large.  No  higher  work  in  the 
world  exists  than  that  of  motherhood,  forming  children 
into  true  and  loving  men  and  women. 

But  this  does  not  cover  all.  In  our  complex  and 
crowded  society,  there  are  thousands  of  women  who 
have  no  home,  who  are  not  wives  and  mothers,  but  who 
are  hungry  to  become  themselves,  to  realise  themselves 
in  work,  to  live  outside  of  themselves  in  the  life  and 
movement  of  the  whole.  These  scarcely  come  into 
Tennyson's  outlook  at  the  end  of  The  Princess.  For 
these,  the  education  in  knowledge  and  the  training  of 
their  powers  to  all  kinds  of  work  which  Ida  established 
in  her  college  are  necessary,  but  with  a  clear  considera- 


The  Princess  187 

tion  of  sexual  difference.  This  work  is,  however,  to  be 
carried  out  on  other  principles  than  those  which  Ida 
laid  down — in  union  with  man,  with  as  large  a  training 
in  the  just  use  of  the  emotions,  in  the  just  expansion  of 
the  imagination,  in  a  true  sight  of  the  beautiful,  and  in 
the  wise  development  of  the  ideal  and  the  spiritual,  as 
in  the  accurate  knowledge  of  science  and  history,  of  law 
and  literature.  And  then,  the  work  of  the  world  lies 
open  to  woman,  to  do  in  a  different  way  from  man,  but 
with  the  same  ends,  and  in  the  same  cause — the  cause 
of  the  happiness,  the  goodness,  and  the  love  of  hu- 
manity. 

When  that  is  possible — when  we  shall  have  applied  to 
all  the  problems  of  society  the  now  and  as  yet  unused 
elements  which  exist  in  womanhood — all  results  will  be 
reached  twice  as  quickly  as  they  are  now  reached,  all 
human  work  will  be  twice  as  quickly  done.  And  then, 
perhaps,  some  new  poet  will  write  a  new  Princess. 


CHAPTER  VII 


IN   MEMORIAM 


THE  history  of  the  writing  of  In  Me?noriam  is  well 
known.  If  an  immortal  fame  can  comfort  Arthur 
Hallam,  who  was  so  soon  bereft  of  the  bright- 
ness of  the  earth,  then  he  is  consoled  in  his  high 
place  for  the  loss  of  human  life  ;  for  surely  while  the 
language  of  England  lasts,  sg_ long  will  /;/  Memoriam  be 
read  and  Arthur  Hallam  be  remembered.  Thirty 
years  ago,  I  made  a  pilgrimage  to  the  little  church  near 
Clevedon,  where  the  Hallams  rest,  and  saw  the  grave- 
yard, the  yews,  and  the  marble  tablet  glimmering  in  the 
church.  It  was  then  a  lonely  quiet  place,  in  a  furrow 
of  the  sandy  slopes,  not  a  house  standing  near  it  ;  and 
fifty  yards  from  it,  but  hidden  from  view,  the  broad 
estuary  of  the  Severn  filled  with  the  tide.  I  heard  the 
water  wash  the  feet  of  the  low  cliffs  as  it  passed  by. 
Sorrow  and  death,  peace  that  passeth  understanding,  the 
victory  of  the  soul,  seemed  present  with  me  ;  and  the 
murmuring  of  the  Severn  became,  as  I  dreamed,  the 
music  of  eternal  love,  into  whose  vast  harmonies  all 
our  discords  are  drawn  at  last. 


In  Memoriam  189 


I  felt,  it  seemed,  the  impression  of  the  place.  I 
knew  afterwards  that  it  was  the  impression  of  the  poem 
that  I  gave  to  the  place.  And  this  indeed  is  the  lasting 
power  of  In  Memoriam.  It  is  a  song  of  victory  and 
life  arising  out  of  defeat  and  death  ;  of  peace  which  has 
forgotten  doubt ;  of  joy  whose  mother  was  sorrow  but 
who  has  turned  his  mother's  heart  into  delight.  The 
conquest  of  love — the  moral  triumph  of  the  soul  over  the 
worst  blows  of  fate,  over  the  outward  forces  of  Nature, 
even  over  its  own  ill — that  is  the  motive  of  the  poems 
which  endure,  which,  like  the  great  lighthouses,  stand 
and  shine  through  the  storms  of  time  to  save  and  lead 
into  a  haven  of  peace  the  navies  of  humanity.  We  are 
flooded  to-day  with  poems  of  despair,  with  verse  which 
boasts  that  it  describes  the  real  when  it  describes  the 
base,  which  takes  the  vulture's  pleasure  in  feeding  on 
the  corruption  of  society,  and  prophesies,  \vhen  it  lifts 
its  dripping  beak  from  the  offal,  that  to  this  carcass- 
complexion  the  whole  of  humanity  will  come  at  last. 
Tennyson  himself  has  painted  the  class  : 

We  are  men  of  ruin'd  blood, 

Therefore  comes  it  we  are  wise  ! 

Virtue  ! — to  be  good  and  just — 

Every  heart,  when  sifted  well. 
Is  a  dot  of  warmer  dust. 

Mixed  with  cunning  sparks  of  hell. 

The  art  and  the  temper  that  produce  the  poetry  of 
despair  and  vileness  will  not  last  ;  and  it  is  a  comfort  to 
think  of  this  when    we   are  greatly    troubled  with  the 


190  Tennyson 

stenches  of  what  they  falsely  call  the  real.  The 
poetry  of  the  soul's  defeat  withers  in  the  mind  of  the 
race.  The  poet  himself  who  writes  it  withers  away. 
Had  In  Memoriatn  been  only  wailing  for  loss  it  would 
have  perished,  even  if  its  work  had  been  better  than  it 
is  ;  but  since  it  tells  of  loss  passing  into  love,  since  it 
describes  death  entering  into  life,  it  is  sure  to  live,  and 
would  do  so  even  if  its  work  had  been  less  excellent. 
Of  course  I  do  not  mean  that  inartistic  work,  if  its  mo- 
tive be  a  victorious  one,  will  live.  I  write  of  artists  and 
their  work,  not  of  those  who  are  not  artists.  The 
poetic  work  of  those  that  are  not  artists,  of  whatever 
temper  it  be,  is  bound  to  perish. 

But  In  Memoriatn  is  a  work  of  art,  done  by  a  man 
whose  natural  gift  had  been  polished  by  study,  and  care- 
fully trained  by  steady  practice  till  it  rejoiced  in  its 
own  power.  Its  subject  impassioned  its  writer,  and  the 
subject  was  simple,  close  to  the  heart  of  man.  As  the 
poem  moved  on,  the  subject  expanded,  and  the  sorrow" 
spoken  of  passed  from  the  particular  into  the  universal. 
The  victory  over  the  evil  of  sorrow  made  a  similar  pas- 
sage. The  poet's  personal  conquest  of  pain  became  the 
universal  conquest  of  the  human  race.  This  expansion 
of  the  subject  ennobled  the  poem,  and  the  triumphant 
close  secured  and  established  its  nobility.  It  will  last 
when  all  its  detractors  and  their  criticisms  are  together 
dust. 

It  was  published  in   1850,     The  collected  poems  were 
published   in   1842,  The  Princess  in  1847  i  ^^^  the  sub- 


In  Memoriam  191 


ject  of  ///  Memoriam  and  the  writing  of  the  poem  had 
been  kept  in  Tennyson's  mind  for  seventeen  years,  from 
1833  to  1849,  ripening  season  by  season  into  the  full  and 
perfect  fruit.  This  is  the  way  in  which  Tennyson 
wrought  at  his  natural  gift,  and  I  repeat  that  it  was 
partly  owing  to  this  steady  slowness  of  his  that  his 
poetic  genius  retained  to  so  great  an  age  its  clearness,  its 
power,  and  its  fire.  It  was  owing  to  this  also  that  his 
gift  gained  and  retained  that  capacity  for  beautiful  and 
careful  finish  which,  when  the  ardour  of  youth  has 
departed  from  an  artist,  is  the  excellence  which  makes 
the  work  of  his  maturity  delightful.  This  was  in  his 
character.  There  was  that  in  him  from  his  very  birth 
which  made  him  love  to  grow  and  work  as  slowly  as  an 
oak  lays  fibre  to  fibre  ;  as  firmly,  as  steadily,  and  with  as 
enduring  a  vitality.  His  patient  work  on  In  Mejnoriam 
was  of  the  very  essence  of  the  man. 

And  now,  how  did  In  Memoriatn  arise  into  its  form  ? 

When  a  poet  first  begins  to  write,  he  writes  of  the 
motives  which  have  excited  his  youth,  and  those  motives 
are  born  out  of  his  own  life,  rather  than  out  of  the  life 
of  the  world  without  him.  They  are  individual,  not 
universal.  His  boyhood,  his  youth,  his  early  loves,  his 
pleasures  at  the  university,  his  classic  studies,  the  charm 
of  the  Greek  stories  ;  his  first  delight  in  the  romantic 
tale  such  as  that  of  Arthur,  his  vacation  rambles  and  the 
discussions  which  made  them  vivid  ;  the  light  fancies  of 
youth,  the  happy  pity  of  sad  stories  ;  the  loveliness  of 
Nature  round  his  home,  and  in  the  wilder  places  of  the 


192  Tennyson 

mountain  and  the  glen  ;  the  daily  life  of  country  folk, 
seen  through  the  emotions  of  youthful  love  ;  and  now 
and  then  such  philosophy  of  life  as  belongs  to  the  young 
man  who  argues  round  rather  than  pierces  into  the  great 
l)roblems,  because  they  have  not  as  yet  smitten  him  to 
the  heart — these  are  the  motives  of  a  poet's  youth.  Out 
of  this  experience  or  rather  this  want  of  experience,  this 
personal  play  of  only  personal  emotion  over  circum- 
stance and  over  the  working  of  his  own  soul,  the  first 
poems  of  the  artist  are  born,  and  they  fill  his  heart  to 
the  exclusion  of  those  greater  subjects  which  concern 
the  whole  of  humanity. 

The  weight  and  trouble  of  the  world  of  men,  the  cry 
of  the  questioning  soul  of  humanity,  the  massive  prob- 
lems of  the  whole  race,  have  not  yet  sent  their  waves  of 
emotion  on  him  with  sufficient  force  to  put  his  individ- 
uality into  the  second  place.  There  is  no  room  for  these 
outward  and  world-wide  emotions  until  the  personal 
emotions  of  youth  are  expressed  and  exhausted  by  ex- 
pression. But  when  these  have  been  expressed  (as  in 
the  volumes  of  1830  and  1833),  then  the  soul  is,  as  it 
were,  empty.  And  on  this  void  soul,  waiting  for  new 
thoughts  and  their  emotions,  the  great  trouble  of  man- 
kind flows  in  with  a  full  tide,  and  brings  with  it  univer- 
sal tidings,  deeper  passions,  greater  ranges  of  thought 
than  the  poet  has  known  as  yet.  It  does  more  ;  it  has  a 
distinct  action  on  the  soul  itself.  It  not  only  brings 
new  things  from  without,  but  it  also  awakens  within  the 
poet  powers  of  his  own  as  yet  unknown  by  him,  as  yet 


In  Memoriam 


193 


asleep.  They  are  the  powers  by  which  the  poet  is  fitted 
to  deal  with  the  great  and  universal  questions,  to  answer 
which  constitutes  the  struggle  of  mankind.  Now  and 
then  they  lift  their  head,  and  appear  in  the  verse,  but 
their  time  is  not  yet,  and  they  let  fall  their  head  again 
in  slumber.  But  now,  at  the  inward  rush  of  the  vast 
trouble  of  the  world  of  man,  they  spring  into  full  life, 
and  dwell  in  the  place  that  personal  feeling  once  occu- 
pied alone.  The  universal  has  come,  and  though  the 
particular  is  not  destroyed,  it  is  absorbed. 

Into  what  shape  it  will  first  turn  itself — whether  it  will 
gather  its  questions  and  feelings  round  religion,  or  social 
movements,  or  war,  or  womanhood,  or  liberty,  or  the 
existence  of  evil,  or  the  future  advent  of  good — will  de- 
pend on  circumstance.  The  circumstance  which  settled 
the  first  direction  of  Tennyson  towards  the  universal, 
which  brought  the  world-question  into  its  special  shape 
for  him,  was  the  death  of  his  dearest  friend.  And  the 
death  was  so  tragic,  and  the  circumstances  so  special, 
that  it  was  impossible  that  the  questions  roused  by  it 
should  be  only  personal.  Arthur  Hallam  was  as  young 
as  Tennyson  ;  his  powers  seemed  so  exceptional  that  his 
father,  who  was  of  all  literary  men  the  most  sober  and 
balanced  in  his  judgments,  imagined  him  capable  of  the 
greatest  things.  It  was  thought  that  a  splendid  future 
was  before  him,  and  his  loss  seemed  to  his  friends  to  be 
a  loss  to  all  mankind.  The  grief  of  family,  of  all  who 
loved  him,  came,  in  this  fashion,  to  be  representative  of 

the  sorrow  of  the  whole  world.    This  touched  Tennyson 
13 


194  Tennyson 

home,  and  depth  and  poignancy  Avere  given  to  it  because 
his  friend  was  not  only  a  friend,  but  a  brother  artist. 
Both  were  poets,  both  worked  together  at  poetry,  both 
looked  forward  to  a  long  life  of  art  together.  I  do  not 
remember  anything  like  it  since  the  death  of  Girtin  and 
the  silent  sorrow  of  Turner  ;  but  the  parallel  is  a  worthy 
one,  it  fits  at  almost  every  point. 

Thus  the  outward  imjjulse  came  on  Tennyson's  soul, 
now  discharged  of  all  the  gathered  subjects  of  youth, 
relieved  of  the  merely  individual.  The  vast  question  of 
human  sorrow  for  the  loss  of  those  who  are  loved,  sor- 
row as  infinite  and  as  varied  as  love,  belonging  to  all  the 
lovers  and  friends  of  the  whole  world,  going  back  with 
imremitting  force  through  tlie  whole  of  time,  felt  as 
keenly  by  those  who  chipped  out  the  fiake  of  flint  as  by 
Tennyson  himself — this,  in  all  its  universal  humanity, 
was  Ijornc  in  upon  him  now,  and  filled  his  soul.  He 
felt  the  loss  of  his  friend  ;  he  felt  the  loss  of  all  the 
friends  of  the  whole  world.  This  was  Tennyson's  step 
into  manhood  as  a  poet  :  and  the  slow,  sustained  and 
yet  impassioned  march  by  which  his  character  forced 
him  to  advance,  made  it  but  natural  for  him  to  take 
seventeen  years  to  realise  and  embody  his  progress  in  a 
work  which  is  worthy  of  the  time  given  to  it,  and  which 
remains  the  weightiest  in  thought,  the  best  in  form,  the 
most  varied  in  feeling,  and  the  most  finished  of  all  his 
longer  poems. 

Such  is  the  psychical  history  of  this  poem,  as  I  con- 
ceive it,   and   I  think  the  poem  bears   out   the  analysis, 


In  Memoriam  195 


even  in  its  arrangement.  Before,  however,  I  speak  of 
that  arrangement,  I  wish  to  dwell  on  some  characteristics 
of  the  poem  and  on  some  accusations  made  against  it. 
First,  it  was  begun  immediately  after  the  youthful  poems, 
and  youth  lingers  in  it  in  lovely  ways.  When  young 
Imagination  rushes  forward  in  it,  he  does  not  appear  in 
his  gaiety,  in  his  youthful  dress.  He  is  solemnised 
somewhat  by  the  subject,  and  wears  the  noble  mask  of 
tragedy.  The  rush  is  there,  but  its  swiftness  is  stately. 
Moreover,  it  is  quite  natural  that  these  passages  of 
youthful  fire  and  glow  do  not  occur  in  the  first  part 
where  the  personal  grief  is  recent  and  foremost,  but  in 
the  second,  or  rather  in  the  third,  when  the  pain  of  loss 
is  lessened,  and  the  sweetness  of  memory  and  the 
soothing  of  faith  have  discharged  bitterness  from  the 
soul.  I  do  not  know  in  any  of  the  earlier  poems,  not 
even  in  Maud,  anything  on  a  higher  range  of  passionate 
imagination,  and  breathing  more  of  youthful  ardour 
weighted  with  dignity  of  thought,  than  a  song  like  this  : 


Wild  bird,  whose  warble,  liquid  sweet, 
Rings  Eden  thro'  the  budded  quicks, 
O  tell  me  where  the  senses  mix, 

O  tell  me  where  the  passions  meet, 


Whence  radiate  :  fierce  extremes  employ 

Thy  spirits  in  the  darkening  leaf. 
And  in  the  midmost  heart  of  grief 
Thy  passion  clasps  a  secret  joy  ; 


196  Tennyson 

And  I — my  harp  would  prelude  woe — 

I  cannot  all  command  the  strings  ; 

The  glory  of  the  sum  of  things 
Will  flash  along  the  chords  and  go. 

Or,  take  this  other,  where  the  loveliness  of  Nature  is 
met  and  received  with  joy  by  that  receptive  spirit  of 
delight  in  a  sensuous  impression  which  a  young  man  feels, 
and  where  the  depth  of  the  feeling  has  wrought  the 
short  poem  into  an  intensity  of  unity  ;  each  verse  linked, 
like  bell  to  bell  in  a  chime,  to  the  verse  before  it,  and  all 
swinging  into  a  triumphant  close  ;  swelling  as  they  go 
from  thought  to  thought,  and  finally  rising  from  the 
landscape  of  earth  to  the  landscape  of  infinite  space — 
can  anything  be  more  impassioned  and  yet  more  solemn  ? 
It  has  the  swiftness  of  youth,  and  the  nobleness  of  man- 
hood's sacred  joy  : 

Sweet  after  showers,  ambrosial  air, 
That  rollest  from  the  gorgeous  gloom 
Of  evening  over  brake  and  bloom 

And  meadow,  slowly  breathing  bare 

The  round  of  space,  and  rapt  below 
Thro'  all  the  dewy-tassell'd  wood, 
And  shadowing  down  the  horned  flood 

In  ripples,  fan  my  brows  and  blow 

The  fever  from  my  cheek,  and  sigh 
The  full  new  life  that  feeds  thy  breath 
Throughout  my  frame,  till  Doubt  and  Death, 

111  brethren,  let  the  fancy  fly 

From  belt  to  belt  of  crimson  seas 

On  leagues  of  odour  streaming  far, 

To  where  in  yonder  orient  star 
A  hundred  spirits  whisper  "  Peace." 


In  Memoriam 


197 


There  are  many  other  passages  I  might  quote  in  this 

connection,    but  these    are    enough    to    prove   that   the 

ardour  of  youth  is  not  absent  from  In  Memoriam.     Only 

one  thing  I  add.     The  passion  is  not  that  of  love  alone, 

of  personal  pain  or  joy  alone.     It  is  felt  for  all  humanity, 

as  well  as  for  himself — nay,  his  self  is  drowned  in   the 

greater  emotion.     It   is  a  passion  also  which  is  not  all 

feeling  ;  it  is  deepened  by  the  universal  thoughts  which 

are  mingled  with  it  ;  and  when  emotion  is  charged  with 

thought    (as  the  great   waters   are  with  salt),  it  is  then 

strongest,   most  living,  and   most  worthy  of  humanity. 

Nevertheless,    the    sweetness   and    nearness  of  personal 

feeling  is  not  wanting.     This  is  also  felt  as  one  feels  it 

in  youth,  when  tenderness  rather  than  thoughtfulness  is 

first.     The   loveliest   example  of  this  in  the  poems  of 

1833  is  ; 

Break,  break,  break, 
On  thy  cold  gray  stones,  O  Sea. 

But  the  little  poem  which  here  follows  is  not  unworthy 
of  this  predecessor.  I  do  not  even  know  whether  its 
note  is  not  more  delicate  and  tender  ;  the  wash  of  the 
Severn  in  it  is  more  homelike,  more  near  to  the  human- 
ity of  sorrow  than  the  desolate  dash  of  the  sea. 
The  Danube  to  the  Severn  gave 

The  darken'd  heart  that  beat  no  more  ; 
They  laid  him  by  the  pleasant  shore, 
And  in  the  hearing  of  the  wave. 

There  twice  a  day  the  Severn  fills  ; 
The  salt  sea-water  passes  by. 
And  hushes  half  the  babbling  Wye, 

And  makes  a  silence  in  the  hills. 


198  Tennyson 

The  Wye  is  husli'd  nor  moves  along. 
And  hush'd  my  deepest  grief  of  all. 
When  fill'd  witli  tears  that  cannot  fall, 

I  brim  with  sorrow  drowning  song. 

The  tide  flows  down,  the  wave  again 

Is  vocal  in  its  wooded  walls  ; 

My  deeper  anguish  also  falls, 
And  I  can  speak  a  little  then. 

That  is  the  full  pathos  of  personal  sorrow.  There  is 
nothing  universal  in  it.  It  is  all  youth — and  yet  how 
finished  is  its  art  !  How  delicately  the  work  of  Nature 
without  is  woven  together  with  the  labour  of  pain 
within,  and  how  unforgetful  is  the  reader  kept,  as  the 
verse  goes  on,  of  the  place  where  the  poet  stands,  of  the 
grave  in  which  Arthur  lies  ! 

Connected  with  this  last,  and  indeed  a  part  of  it  which 
I  desire  to  isolate,  is  the  next  point.  An  objection  sim- 
ilar to  that  made  to  Lycidas,  is  made  to  In  Mejuoriam. 
As  in  Lycidas  the  grief  is  lost,  as  some  say,  in  conven- 
tional ornament,  or,  as  others  say,  in  the  mere  making  of 
a  poem,  so  the  grief  in  //;  Memoriatn  is  lost,  we  are  told, 
in  theology  and  philosophy.  There  is  some  apparent 
truth  in  the  objection.  But  first  and  foremost,  the  grief 
is  not  lost.  It  appears,  as  it  does  not  appear  in  Lycidas. 
Secondly,  we  must  remember  that  the  poem  is  the  tale 
of  two  years  and  a  half,  and  that  the  sorrow  for  his 
friend  passes  through  this  period,  and  changes  its 
form  as  time  changes  all  our  sorrows.  It  is  full, 
close,  and  even  over-sentimental  in  expression  at 
the    beginning.       It    is    mingled,     in    the     middle    of 


In  Memoriam  199 


the  poem,  with  the  doubts  that  its  suffering  brings. 
It  passes  into  peace  and  victory  at  the  close.  But  it  is 
never  lost,  and  it  becomes  more  true  to  human  nature, 
more  gentle,  as  the  poem  develops.  There  are  few  lyri- 
cal movements  lovelier  and  tenderer  than  the  great  can- 
zone where  Tennyson  describes  his  reading  late  at  night 
the  letters  of  the  dead,  and  the  waking  vision  of  thought, 
when  his  soul,  touched  by  his  friend's  power  from  the 
other  world,  is  borne  with  him  into  the  universe  of  spirit. 
That  is  the  voice  of  true  love,  infinitely  tender,  and, 
while  regretful,  moved  by  a  nobler  friendship  than  had 
been  of  old  on  earth  ;  and  every  one  who  has  loved  and 
lost,  and  has  not  yielded  to  the  selfishness  of  grief,  knows 
that  such  an  hour  is  deeper,  and  more  tender  than  tongue 
can  tell.  Moreover,  we  must  also  remember  that  the 
subject  has  passed,  beyond  his  sorrow  for  his  friend, 
into  consideration  of  the  sorrow  of  the  whole  world  ; 
and  the  universality  of  the  emotion  felt  increases  the 
intensity  of  it.  We  can  trace  its  growth.  The 
first  part  of  the  poem  which  belongs  only  to  his 
particular  sorrow  for  Arthur  is  weak  in  comparison 
with  the  last.  Yet,  when  he  comes  to  think  of  the 
universal  sorrow,  it  is  knit  up  still  with  his  friend, 
and  the  triumph  of  the  whole  is  also  the  triumph  of  his 
friend.  When  we  compare  even  that  fine  passage  I  have 
quoted,  "  The  Danube  to  the  Severn  gave,"  with  this — 
"  Dear  friend,  far  off,  my  lost  desire  " — which  now  I  quote, 
what  a  change  !  what  a  difference  in  the  depth  and 
strength  of  the   feeling  !  The  feeling    is    still   personal, 


200  Tennyson 

but  it  is  also  universal.  The  love  Avhich  fills  it  is  not 
less  because  it  mingles  the  whole  universe  with  his 
friend.  Nay,  it  is  greater,  for  the  love  of  the  whole 
world,  of  God  and  Nature  and  man,  and  the  joy  of  love's 
victory  have  been  added  to  it  : 


Dear  friend,  far  off,  my  lost  desire, 
So  far,  so  near  in  woe  and  weal ; 
O  loved  the  most,  when  most  I  feel 

There  is  a  lower  and  a  higher  ; 

Known  and  unknown  ;  human,  divine  ; 

Sweet  human  hand  and  lips  and  eye  ; 

Dear  heavenly  friend  that  canst  not  die. 
Mine,  mine,  for  ever,  ever  mine. 

Strange  friend,  past,  present,  and  to  be  ; 

Loved  deeplier,  darklier  understood  ; 

Behold,  I  dream  a  dream  of  good, 
And  mingle  all  the  world  with  thee. 


Thy  voice  is  on  the  rolling  air  ; 

I  hear  thee  where  the  waters  run  ; 

Thou  standest  in  the  rising  sun, 
And  in  the  setting  thou  art  fair. 

What  art  thou  then  ?  I  cannot  guess  ; 
But  though  I  seem  in  star  and  flower 
To  feel  thee  some  diffusive  power, 

I  do  not  therefore  love  thee  less  : 

Thy  love  involves  the  love  before  ; 

My  love  is  vaster  passion  now  ; 

Tho'  mix  d  with  God  and  Nature  thou, 
I  seem  to  love  thee  more  and  more . 


In  Memoriam  201 


Far  off  thou  art,  but  ever  nigh  ; 

I  have  thee  still,  and  I  rejoice  ; 

I  prosper,  circled  with  thy  voice  ; 
I  shall  not  lose  thee  tho'  I  die. 


That  is  one  form  of  the  fervent  feeling  of  Tennyson, 
and  it  is  worth  a  hundredfold  more  than  our  merely 
personal  sorrows,  joys,  and  loves.  The  deep  and  ardent 
emotion  which  is  awakened  by  the  mightiest  and  best 
thoughts,  gathering  round  the  great  and  noble  realities 
which  belong  to  all  mankind,  and  stir  eternal  yearning 
and  high  desire  in  the  heart  of  man,  is  worthier  to  feel, 
and  nobler  to  celebrate  in  song,  than  the  fleeting  ar- 
dours of  youth  which  are  concerned  with  ourselves 
alone,  and  which  imprison  us  in  ourselves. 

It  has  been  said  that  Tennyson  fails  in  passion,  and 
when  men  say  that,  they  mean  the  embodiment  of 
the  passion  of  love  in  verse.  It  is  true  that  he  is  not 
capable  of  describing  the  wilder,  the  more  sensuous 
phases  of  love.  The  only  poem  in  which  he  ever  tried 
it  is  one  called  Faii/fia,  and  it  is  a  great  failure.  But 
to  say  that  he  is  incapable  of  describing  the  ardent  love 
of  a  man  for  a  maid  is  to  forget  Maud,  and  Maud  dots  not 
stand  alone.  Nevertheless,  his  intenser  singing  belongs 
to  other  spheres.  The  personal  loves  of  earth  fade  and 
die,  unless  they  are  taken  up  into  wider  and  higher 
loves,  unless  they  are  expanded  to  fit  into  the  love  of 
man  and  the  love  of  God.  And  Tennyson  always, 
or  almost  always,  lifts  them  into  those  loftier  regions. 
This  is  the  full  drift  of  Iti  Memoriam. 


202  Tennyson 

Moreover,  as  age  grows  on  us,  and  youthful  ardours 
fade,  love,  which  was  once  engaged  with  persons,  and 
which,  in  loving  persons,  learned  to  know  itself  and 
its  powers,  is  content  no  longer  with  persons.  It 
desires  to  expand,  it  prunes  its  wings  for  a  larger  flight 
into  regions  where  self-desire  is  lost.  It  loves  a  coun 
try  and  can  die  for  its  honour.  It  loves  the  great 
causes  which  set  forward  mankind,  and  in  such  devo- 
tion it  loves  the  whole  race  of  man.  It  loves  Nature, 
not  in  parts  as  once  in  youth,  not  because  it  is  made  to 
reflect  our  feelings,  but  as  a  whole  and  for  itself  alone. 
It  loves  the  great  ideas — truth,  justice,  honour,  purity, 
uprightness,  the  liberty  and  duties  of  man,  the  union 
of  all  mankind  in  spirit  and  in  truth.  It  loves,  finally, 
God,  in  whom  all  Nature  and  man  are  contained  and 
loved,  in  whom  all  the  great  ideas  and  truths  are  em- 
bodied, from  whom  they  flow  and  to  whom  they  return, 
bringing  with  them  the  men  and  women  to  whom  they 
have  been  given.  It  loves,  thus,  the  whole  universe. 
And  the  emotion  which  these  vaster  loves  awaken  is 
deeper,  stronger,  and  more  noble  than  that  which  is 
stirred  by  the  personal  loves  of  youth.  It  is  enduring  ; 
it  is  coeval  with  God  Himself  ;  and  man  only  reaches 
his  true  destiny  when  he  is  thrilled  through  and  througli 
with  its  powers.  These  are  the  loves  which  Tennyson, 
more  than  any  other  poet  of  this  century,  felt  and  sang. 
For  these  he  wrote  with  a  greater  depth  of  feeling  than 
other  men.  It  is  in  celebrating  these  diviner  forms  of 
love,  as  I  might  show  in  poem  after  poem,  that  he  writes 


In  Memoriam  20-? 


with  the  greatest  glow  and  fire  ;  and  it  is  for  this  that 
humanity,  as  it  grows  into  capacity  for  the  more  immor- 
tal affections,  will  always  honour  him.  This,  too,  was 
in  his  character.  It  was  one  of  the  roots  of  the  man. 
The  tendency,  the  conduct,  the  upbuilding,  the  power, 
and  the  life  of  his  poetry  find  in  this  their  best  expla- 
nation ;  nor  is  there  any  better  example  than  In  Memo- 
nam  of  this  expansion  of  love  from  the  particular  to 
the  universal,  or  of  the  profound  ardour  with  which  he 
made  its  song. 

It  remains  to  say  something  of  the  manner  in  which 
Tennyson  uses  and  describes  Nature  in  In  Memoriam. 
The  scenery  of  the  poem  is  partly  of  the  downs  and  of  the 
sea  in  the  distance  ;  partly  of  a  woodland  country  made 
vocal  by  a  brook  ;  and  sometimes  of  a  garden  full  of 
flowers  and  a  lawn  with  far-branching  trees,  elm,  beech, 
and  sycamore.  Two  parts  of  England  contribute  their 
landscape  to  the  verse,  for  in  the  midst  of  the  poem 
Tennyson  changes  his  dwelling-place  ;  but  the  scenery 
of  the  first  part  is  often  recollected  and  described  in  the 
second. 

Nature  is  used  in  diverse  ways.  Sometimes  the  land- 
scape is  taken  up  by  the  poet  into  his  own  being  spirit- 
ualised therein,  and  made  by  stress  of  passion  to  image 
the  movement  of  his  inner  life.  Then  the  outward 
scene  and  the  inward  feeling  are  woven  together  moment 
by  moment  with  an  intensity  which  makes  them  one. 
And  this  is  done  in    an  accumulative  fashion.     Vision 


204  Tennyson 

after  vision  of  Nature,  each  of  a  greater  beauty  and 
sentiment  than  its  predecessor,  succeed  one  another,  and 
each  of  them  is  fitted  to  a  corresponding  exaltation  of 
the  emotions  of  the  soul.  There  is  no  better  example 
of  this  method  than  the  song  I  have  elsewhere  quoted  : 

Sweet  after  showers,  ambrosial  air. 

Nor  is  the  conclusion  of  xcv. — that  full-throated  pas- 
sage about  the  growing  dawn  and  the  rising  wind — in- 
ferior in  this  intense  clasping  together  of  Nature  and 
the  soul,  or  in  this  accumulating  power.  Another 
example  of  the  same  method  is  to  be  found  in  the 
Hesper-Phosphor  poem  (cxxi,).  This,  the  form  of  which 
is  different  from  the  other  examples  of  the  same  method, 
is  the  most  finished  piece  of  conscious  art  in  In  Menio- 
ria??i.  Two  general  aspects  of  Nature  under  the  same 
star — the  evening  and  the  morning  star — are  taken  to 
represent  the  two  positions  of  his  soul,  in  the  past  and 
in  the  present.  Both  these  aspects  are  made  alive  by 
the  simple  doings  of  human  life  that  naturally  belong  to 
the  waking  of  the  world  from  rest,  and  the  going  of  the 
world  to  rest.  Then  both,  since  Hesper  and  Phosphor 
are  the  same,  since  the  morning  brings  the  evening  in 
its  arms,  since  the  evening  bears  within  it  the  waking  of 
the  dawn,  are  smitten  together,  like  his  past  and  present, 
into  one. 

Another  method  describes  at  some  length  a  single 
aspect  of  Nature,  and  then  at  the  end  throws  back  on 
this   special   aspect   the   mood   of   his  mind.     In  these 


In  Memoriam  205 


poems  we  have  the  finest  descriptions  of  Nature  in  //; 
Memoriam ;  and  frequently  in  two  adjacent  poems  two 
opposed  moods  of  Nature  are  represented  in  contrast 
one  with  another.  The  calm  of  the  whole  world  in  the 
morning  hour  (xi,)  is  set  over  against  the  tempest  which 
the  evening  has  brought  upon  the  same  landscape  (xv.). 
They  image  his  calm  despair  and  wild  unrest,  and  per- 
haps created  them  ;  for  Nature  often  makes  our  passions 
and  then  mirrors  them. 

No  calm  was  ever  deeper  in  verse  than  it  is  on  that 
high  wold  in  the  morning,  and  no  storm  wilder  than  it  is 
on  the  same  wold  in  the  evening  ;  and  Tenviyson  takes 
the  greatest  pains  to  describe  the  vastness  of  the  out- 
spread landscape,  under  both  these  moods  of  Nature. 
In  the  first  he  sees  the  moor  at  his  feet,  the  dews  on  the 
furze,  the  gossamers  that  tremble  not,  so  still  is  the  air, 
but  which  twinkle  in  the  lifting  light  of  morning.  Then 
he  raires  his  eyes,  and  that  far  landscape  to  which 
Shelley  or  Wordsworth  would  have  allotted  twenty  or 
thirty  lines,  is  done  in  four : 

Calm  and  still  light  on  yon  great  plain 
That  sweeps  with  all  its  autumn  bowers, 
And  crowded  farms  and  lessening  towers, 

To  mingle  with  the  bounding  main. 

This  is  Tennyson's  concentrated  manner,  and  the 
landscape  seems  all  the  larger  from  the  previous  de- 
scription of  the  small  space  of  ground  on  which  he  is 
standing.  I  do  not  say  that  it  is  better  than  the  expan- 
sive landscapes  of  Shelley  or  Wordsworth,  but  it  is  done 


2o6  Tennyson 

in  a  differ ;..t  way,  and  with  its  own  distinct  emotion 
Wc  may  set  beside  it  another  description  of  cahn  in  the 
epilogue  where  the  landscape  is  equally  far  and  vast-  -a 
moonlight  vision  alive  with  streaming  cloud  and  with 
the  moving  of  the  moon  all  the  night  long — a  most  beau- 
tiful thing,  drenched  with  the  silent  loveliness  of  the 
universe. 

Dumb  is  that  tower  that  spake  so  loud, 
And  high  in  heaven  the  streaming  cloud, 
And  on  the  downs  a  rising  fire  : 

And  rise,  O  moon,  from  yonder  down, 

Till  over  down  and  over  dale 

All  night  the  shining  vapour  sail 
And  pass  the  silent-lighted  town. 

The  white-faced  halls,  the  glancing  rills. 
And  cf.tch  at  every  moun'-in  head. 
And  o'er  the  friths  that  bran  jh  and  spread 

Their  sleeping  silver  through  the  hills. 

The  landscape  is  as  far  as  it  is  fair,  and  it  is  immedi- 
ately taken  up,  in  accordance  with  the  first  method  of 
which  I  have  spoken,  into  his  own  soul,  into  his  blessing 
on  the  bridal  pair;  and  then  inwoven  with  the  com- 
ing child,  and  with  the  race  of  man.  We  might  now 
think  that  this  poet  of  wide  distances  would  not  be  able 
to  picture  thj  quiet  of  a  narrow  and  enclosed  space  ;  of 
a  lawn  and  garden  on  a  summer  evening.  But  he  does 
this  with  equal  force  and  beauty.  The  poem  (xcv,) 
beginning— 


In  Memoriam  207 


By  night  we  linger'd  on  the  lawn, 


breath  s  with  the  peace  of  all  the  country-homes  of  Eng- 
land, and,  even  more,  with  the  happy  stillness  of  human 
hearts,  of  one  another  sure. 

The  storms  described  in  In  Memoriam  are  done  in  the 
same  way  as  these  images  of  calm.  The  tempest  of  the 
fifteenth  section  begins  with  what  is  close  at  hand — the 
wood  by  which  he  stands  at  sunset — 

The  last  red  leaf  is  whirl'd  away, 
The  rooks  are  blown  about  the  skies. 

And  then,  after  that  last  admirable  line  which  fills  the 
whole  sky  with  the  gale,  he  lifts  his  eyes,  as  before,  and 
we  see  with  him  the  whole  world  below,  painted  also  in 
four  lines — the  forest,  the  waters,  the  meadows,  struck 
out,  each  in  one  word  ;  and  the  wildness  of  the  wind 
and  the  width  of  the  landscape  given,  as  Turner  would 
have  given  them,  by  the  low  shaft  of  storm-shaken  sun- 
light dashed  from  the  west  right  across  to  the  east — 

The  forest  crack'd,  the  waters  curl'd, 

The  cattle  huddled  on  the  lea  ; 

And  wildly  dash'd  on  tower  and  tree 
The  sunbeam  strikes  along  the  world. 

Lastly,  to  heighten  the  impression  of  tempest,  to  show 
the  power  it  will  have  when  the  night  is  come,  to  add  a 
far  horizon  to  the  solemn  world — he  paints  the  rising 
wrath  of  the  stcrm  in  the  cloud  above  the  ocean  rim,  all 
aflame  with  warlike  sunset, 


2o8  Tennyson 

That  rises  upwards  always  higher, 
And  onward  drags  a  labouring  breast, 
And  topples  round  the  dreary  west, 

A  looming  br,£tion  fringed  with  fire. 

It  is  well  done,  but  whosoever  reads  the  whole  will  feel 
that  the  storm  of  the  human  heart  is  higher  than  the 
storm  of  Nature. 

Tennyson  always  loved  tempestuous  days,  and  this 
general  description  of  storm  is  followed  by  many  others 
of  fierce  weather.  In  Ixxii.  the  whole  of  the  day  is  wild, 
but  here  he  di/ells  on  the  small  and  particular  effects 
caused  by  the  wind.  The  blasts  "  blow  the  poplar 
white  "  ;  the  "  r^se  pulls  sideways  "  ;  the  daisy  "  closes 
her  crimsom  fringes  to  the  shower";  the  "burthened 
browc  "  of  the  day — that  is,  the  looming  clouds — pour 
forth  winds 


That  whirl  the  ungarner'd  sheaf  afar. 
And  sow  the  sky  with  flying  boughs. 


Nor  is  the  winter  gale  and  the  wintry  world  neglected. 
Stanza  cvii.  opens  with  the  sunset  and  the  "  purple-frosty 
bank  of  vapour  "  on  the  horizon,  and  then  the  north-east 
wind  comes  with  the  night.  T.s  fierceness,  keenness, 
iron-heartedness,  its  savage  noise,  the  merciless  weather 
of  it,  pass  from  the  woods  out  to  the  sea,  and  the  moon 
hangs  hard-edged  over  the  passing  squalls  of  snow.  The 
use  of  rough  vowels,  of  words  that  hiss  and  clang,  and 
smite  the  ear,  heightens  the  impression. 


In  Memoriam  209 


Fiercely  flies 
The  blast  of  North  and  East,  and  ice 
Makes  daggers  at  the  sharpen'd  eaves, 

And  bristles  all  the  brakes  and  thorns 
To  yon  hard  crescent,  as  she  hangs 
Above  the  wood  which  grides  and  clangs 

Its  leafless  ribs  and  iron  horns 

Together,  in  the  drifts  that  pass 
To  darken  on  the  rolling  brine 
That  breaks  the  coast. 


The  hand  that  wrought  this  winter  landscape  is  equally 
cunning  in  summer  and  spring.  The  summer  garden 
and  the  summer  lawn  of  Ixxxix.  are  steeped  in  heat  and 
li[;ht.  The  line :  "  Immantled  in  ambrosial  dark," 
"  The  land.xape  Avinking  thro'  the  heat,"  hold  in  them 
alike  the  shade  and  blaze  of  summer  days  ;  and  the 
joyous  sound  of  the  scythe  in  early  morn  is  full  of  the 
sentiment  of  summer — 

O  sound  to  rout  the  brood  of  cares. 
The  sweep  of  scythe  in  morning  dew. 
The  gust  that  round  the  garden  flew. 

And  tumbled  half  the  mellowing  pears  ! 

I  give  one  more  example   for  the  brief  perfection  o^  the 
picture  : 

When  summer's  hourly-mellowing  change 
May  breathe,  with  many  roses  sweet, 
Upon  the  thousand  waves  of  wheat 

That  ripple  round  the  lonely  grange. 


2IO  Tennyson 

As  to  spring,  the  poem  is  full  of  its  wakeful  charm, 
of  its  glad  beginnings,  "  when  (lower  is  feeling  after 
flower."  The  rosy  plumelets  that  tuft  the  larch,  the 
native  hazels  tassel-hung,  the  living  smoke  of  the  yew, 
the  little  speedwell's  darling  blue,  the  laburnum's 
droi)ping-wells  of  fire,  the  sea-blue  bird  of  March  flitting 
underneath  the  barren  ])ush,  the  low  love-language  of 
the  dove,  the  rare  piping  of  the  mounted  thrush,  are  all 
phrases  which  tell  how  closely  he  watched  her  wakening  ; 
and  when  his  heart  is  happy  at  the  end  of  his  poem,  he 
breaks  into  one  of  the  loveliest  songs  of  spring  that  Eng- 
lish poetry  has  ever  made. 

cxv. 

Now  fades  the  last  long  streak  of  snow, 
Now  burgeons  every  maze  of  quick 
About  the  flowering  squares,  and  thick 

By  ashen  roots  the  violets  blow. 

I  need  not  quote  the  rest,  but  it  is  lovely  throughout. 
Almost  all  the  joys  of  spring,  her  scenery  and  its  in- 
dwellers,  her  earth,  and  sky,  and  sea,  and  at  last  the 
springtide  of  his  own  heart,  are  vocal  in  its  feeling  and 
its  art. 

Finally,  there  is  the  landscape  of  memory — another 
method  of  description,  in  which  many  happy  and 
different  aspects  of  Nature  are  gathered  together,  some 
described  in  two  lines,  some  even  flashed  forth  in  half  a 
line,  and  every  one  of  them  humanised  by  tender  feeling 


In  Memoriam  211 


■ — that  feeling  through  recollection  of  Nature  and  his 
friend  together  which  makes  for  every  landscape  its  own 
ethereal  atmosphere,  half  of  soft  air  and  half  of  soft 
emotion.  Of  this  kind  of  natural  description,  so  difficult, 
so  rarely  done  well,  so  exquisite  when  it  is  at  the  same 
time  brief  and  full,  the  two  poems  c.  and  ci.  are  most 
lovely  and  delicate  examples,  and  every  one  who  cares 
for  poetry  should  possess  them  in  his  soul.  Many  also 
are  the  scattered  phrases  about  the  natural  world  which 
might  be  collected  for  their  subtle  simplicity,  beauty, 
and  truth  ;  but  I  close  this  praise  of  the  poet  with  only 
one,  in  which  man  and  Nature  are  inwoven,  and  the 
way  he  wrote  his  poem  enshrined  : 

Short  swallow-flights  of  song,  that  dip 
Their  wings  in  tears,  and  skim  away. 


CHAPTER    VIII 

IN  MEMORIAM  {Continued) 


ITS     STRUCTURE 

THE  question  of  this  Chapter  is — How  was  In  Me- 
moriam  shaped  ?  What  is  the  conduct  of  the 
poem  ? 
It  was  shaped  into  the  continuous  story  of  two  years 
and  a  half  ;  not  a  story  of  events  but  the  story  of  the 
voyage  of  a  soul.  First,  the  hurricane  of  sorrow  came  ; 
then  the  fierceness  of  the  storm  grew  less,  but  left  the 
sea  tormented  and  the  ship  of  the  soul  tossing  from 
wave  to  wave,  from  question  to  question.  At  last  there 
was  calm,  and  the  soul  rested  ;  and  then  a  clear  wind 
arose  in  sunny  skies,  and  the  ship  flew  forward,  all  the 
sails  set  to  victory,  into  a  harbour  of  peace.  But  better 
words  than  the-j  to  describe  the  history  of  I?i  Memoriam 
are  those  .  f  the  Psalm,  said  of  those  who  go  down  into 
the  deep  :  "  They  go  up  to  the  heavens,  and  down  again 
to  the  depth  ;  their  soul  melteth  away  for  very  trouble. 
They  reel  to  and  fro  and  stagger  like  a  drunken  man. 
and  are  at  their  wits'  end.     So  they  cry  unto  the  Lord 

axa 


In  Memoriam  213 


in  their  trouble,  and  He  delivereth  them  out  of  their  dis- 
tress. He  maketh  the  storm  a  calm,  so  that  the  waves 
thereof  are  still.  Then  are  they  glad  because  they  are 
at  rest  :  so  He  bringeth  them  to  the  haven  where  they 
would  be." 

The  time  of  this  story  is  well  marked,  and  it  is  the  first 
thing  its  reader  should  understand.  It  outlines  the  map 
of  the  poem.  It  begins  in  September,  1833,  when  Tenny- 
son hears  of  his  friend's  death  at  Vienna.  It  is  autumn  ; 
the  leaves  are  reddening  to  their  fall,  the  chestnut  is 
pattering  to  the  ground,  as  the  poet  waits  for  the  body 
of  his  friend.     This  autumn  closes  with  a  great  storm  : 

To-night  the  winds  begin  to  rise, 
And  roar  from  yonder  dripping  day, 
The  last  red  leaf  is  whirl'd  away. 

The  rooks  are  blown  about  the  skies. 

Then  the  twenty-eighth,  twenty-ninth,  and  thirtieth 
sections  describe  the  first  Christmas  after  the  death  of 
Arthur.  In  the  thirty-eighth,  the  spring  of  1834  has 
come,  and  in  the  forty-eighth  the  swallows  are  flying 
over  the  waters.  The  seventy-second  records  the  anni- 
versary of  his  friend's  death,  September,  1834.  One 
year  has  passed  by. 

The  Christmas  of  1834  is  recorded  in  the  seventy- 
eighth,  and  the  spring  of  1835  arrives  in  the  eighty-third 
sections.  Full  summer  is  with  us  in  the  eighty-ninth  and 
the  ninety-fifth  ;  and  in  the  ninety-ninth  the  day  of  his 
friend's  death  dawns  after  storm  in  balm  and  peace.  A 
second  year  has  gone  by,  September,  1835. 


2  14  Tennyson 

Another  Christmas  comes  with  the  hundred  and  third 
section,  and  at  the  hundred  and  fourteenth  these  notes 
of  time  close  with  the  Ai)ril  of  1836.  The  poem  lasts, 
then,  just  two  years  and  seven  months.  The  epithala- 
mium  at  the  end,  the  celebration  of  his  sister's  marriage- 
day,  belongs  to  1842  ;  and  the  prologue  to  the  poem  Avas 
written  last  of  all,  and  is  dated  1849. 

And  now,  to  illustrate  the  ])rogress  of  the  soul  from 
sorrow  to  peace,  I  will  take  the  three  main  marks  of 
time  :  the  anniversaries  of  the  death  of  his  friend,  the 
Christmastides,  the  advents  of  spring,  and  dwell  on  the 
changes  of  mind  displayed  in  the  record  of  them.  When 
Tennyson  hears  of  Arthur's  death  (to  take  the  death- 
days  first)  grief  is  all  ;  it  drowns  the  world  ;  Nature 
seems  purposeless,  "  a  hollow  form  with  empty  hands  "  ; 
the  sullen,  changeless  yew-tree  symbolises  the  hardness 
of  his  heart.  When  the  anniversary  of  the  death  comes 
the  memory  of  it  is  still  miserable.     That  hour 

sicken'd  every  living  bloom 
And  blurr'd  the  splendour  of  the  sun. 

It  was  a 

Day  mark'd  as  with  some  hideous  crime, 
When  the  dark  hand  struck  down  thro'  time 
And  cancell'd  nature's  best — 

a  day  "  to  hide  its  shame  beneath  the  ground."  Thus 
even  when  a  year  has  gone  by  the  wrathfulness  of  sorrow 
is  still  deep.  As  yet  there  is  no  forgiveness  of  pain  and 
no  peace  (Ixxii.). 


In  Memoriam  215 


When  the  next  anniversary  dawns  (xcix.)  the  tone  is 
changed  ;  the  birds  are  singing,  the  meadows  breathe 
softly  of  the  past,  the  woodlands  are  holy  to  the  dead  ; 
there  has  been  storm,  but  the  breath  of  the  day  is  now 
balmy,  and  the  swollen  brook  murmurs  a  song  "that 
slights  the  coming  care."  But  the  greatest  change  is 
that  he  thinks  less  of  his  own  pain  and  more  of  the  pain 
of  mankind.  The  dim,  sweet  dawn  awakens  to  myriads 
on  the  earth  memories  of  death,  and  he  feels  that  he  is 
the  comrade  of  all  these  mourners  : 

O  wheresoever  those  may  be, 
Betwixt  the  slumber  of  the  poles. 
To-day  they  count  as  kindred  souls  ; 

They  know  me  not,  but  mourn  with  me. 

This  is  the  progress  at  these  spaces  of  time.  But  if  we 
wish  to  test  it  in  a  better  way,  we  should  choose,  not  the 
anniversaries  of  death  when  the  poet  is  sure  to  have  his 
sorrow  driven  home  to  him,  but  other  times  when  the 
mind  is  freed  from  so  close  a  pressure  of  memory.  I 
take  now  the  three  Christmas  Days. 

When  the  bells  of  the  first  Christmas  Eve  (xxviii.) 
ring  out  peace  and  goodwill,  he  remembers  that  he  had 
almost  wished  to  die  in  his  grief  before  he  heard  them, 
but  they  control  his  spirit  with  a  touch  of  joy  ;  and 
though  he  scarce  dare  keep  his  Christmas  Eve,  so 
deep  is  regret,  yet  let  me  give,  he  cries,  their  due  to 
ancient  use  and  custom,  though  they  too  die.  But  this 
bitterness  perishes  next  day.  He  keeps  his  Christmas 
and    remembers    his    friend  who  was  with  him  the  vear 


2i6  Tennyson 

before.  A  gentler  feeling  creeps  into  his  heart.  The 
dead  rest,  he  says,  their  sleep  is  sweet ;  and  then  the 
first  prophecy  in  the  poem  of  the  resurrection  of  the 
soul  from  the  sorrow  of  loss  is  made,  and  the  verse  lifts 
to  the  thought  : 

Our  voices  took  a  higher  range  ; 

Once  more  Ave  sang — "  They  do  not  die 

Nor  lose  their  mortal  sympathy 
Nor  change  to  us,  although  they  change  ; 

"  Rapt  from  the  fickle  and  the  frail 
With  gather'd  power,  yet  the  same. 
Pierces  the  keen  seraphic  flame 
From  orb  to  orb,  from  veil  to  veil." 

Rise,  happy  morn,  rise,  holy  morn, 
Draw  forth  the  cheerful  day  from  night ; 
O  father,  touch  the  east,  and  light 

The  light  that  shone  when  Hope  was  born. 

A  year  passes,  another  Christmas  comes  (Ixxviii.). 
The  snow  was  silent,  the  day  was  calm,  and  the  sense  of 
something  for  ever  gone  brooded  over  all  Nature  ;  but 
this  sense  of  loss  was  no  longer  stormy  with  passion  of 
grief  but  quiet  like  the  day.  They  played,  he  says,  their 
ancient  games,  but  none  showed  one  token  of  distress  ; 
no  tears  fell.     "  O,"  he  cries, 

O  last  regret,  regret  can  die  ! 

No — mixt  with  all  this  mystic  frame. 
Her  deep  relations  are  the  same, 

But  with  long  use  her  tears  are  dry. 

This  is  not  victory,  and  the  grief  is  still  only  personal. 
The   poet  has   not  escaped  from  himself,  and  the  year, 


In  Memoriam  217 


which  has  been  spent  in  a  half-intellectual  analysis  of 
doubts  and  the  replies  of  the  understanding  to  them,  has 
not  brought  peace  to  the  life  of  the  soul. 

Everything  is  changed  at  the  next  Christmas  (civ.-cvi.). 
He  hears  the  bells  again,  but  he  has  left  the  old  home  for 
another  ;  and  the  change  of  place  has  broken,  like  the 
growth  of  time,  the  bond  of  dying  use.  He  holds  the 
night  of  Christmas  Eve  solemn  to  the  past,  but  as  it  falls, 
he  feels  that  the  merely  personal  is  no  more.  He  sees 
the  stars  rise,  and  the  thought  of  the  great  course  of 
time  moving  on  to  good  for  all  the  world,  of  the  sum- 
mer of  mankind  that  sleeps  in  the  winter  seeds,  enters 
his  heart.     The  universal  has  come. 

No  dance,  no  motion,  save  alone 
What  lightens  in  the  lucid  east 

Of  rising  worlds  by  yonder  wood. 

Long  sleeps  the  summer  in  the  seed  ; 

Run  out  your  measured  arcs,  and  lead 
The  closing  cycle  rich  in  good. 

The  full  significance  of  this  great  change  of  temper 
is  seen  in  the  next  song,  which  celebrates  the  incoming 
of  the  new  year  : 

Ring  out,  wild  bells,  to  the  wild  sky  ; 

a  poem  all  men  know.  It  bids  the  past  die,  and  the 
present  and  future  live.  The  sound  of  the  bells  is 
happy  ;  they  ring  out  all  evil,  and  ring  in  all  good. 
They   ring  out   the    grief  that  sapped  his   mind  ;    they 


2i8  Tennyson 

ring  out  his  mournful  rhymes,  but  they  ring  in  the 
fuller  minstrel  who  sings  of  the  world  that  is  to  be, 
of  the  Christ  who  comes  again.  The  personal  has 
wholly  perished.  His  heart  is  full  of  all  mankind.  His 
own  victory  over  sorrow  has  taught  him  the  victory 
over  sorrow  that  awaits  the  race,  and  the  triumph  of  the 
hour  sounds  nobly  in  the  noble  verse. 

Once  more,  take  the  coming  of  the  three  springtides. 
There  is  some  soothing  thought  in  the  verses  that  describe 
the  spring  of  1834  (xxxviii.).  Six  months  have  passed 
since  Arthur's  death,  and  he  thinks  that  his  friend  may 
know  that  he  has  sung  of  his  goodness.  Yet  though  he 
has  some  comfort,  he  has  no  delight : 

No  joy  the  blowing  season  gives, 

The  herald  melodies  of  spring, 

But  in  the  songs  I  love  losing 
A  doubtful  gleam  of  solace  lives. 

When,  however,  the  spring  of  1835  arrives  (Ixxxiii.) 
his  temper  is  no  longer  retrospective.  Sorrow  is  with 
him  still,  but  he  prophesies  a  new  time,  when  his  heart 
will  be  filled  with  the  joy  of  a  spiritual  spring,  and  his 
soul  sing  of  its  resurrection.  "  O  sweet  new  year,  why 
dost  thou  linger,  what  trouble  can  live  in  April  days  ?  " 

Bring  orchis,  bring  the  foxglove  spire, 
The  little  speedwell's  darling  blue, 
Deep  tulijis  dash'd  with  fiery  dew. 

Laburnums,  dropping- wells  of  fire. 

O  thou,  new-year,  delaying  long, 

Delayest  the  sorrow  in  my  blood. 

That  longs  to  burst  a  frozen  bud 
And  flood  a  fresher  throat  with  song. 


In  Memoriam  219 


And  then,  last  of  all,  in  the  spring  of  1836  (cxv.,  cxvi.) 
regret  has  wholly  died.  The  re-orient  life  of  the  world 
is  the  symbol  of  the  departure  of  the  wintry  grief  that 
looks  back  to  a  friendship  that  seemed  lost,  and  symbol 
also  of  the  gain  of  the  new  friendship  that  is  to  be.  His 
friend's  face  shines  on  him  while  he  muses  alone  ;  the 
dear  voice  speaks  to  him.  "  O  days  and  hours,"  he 
cries,  "  your  work  is  this  " — 

To  hold  me  from  my  proper  place, 
A  little  while  from  his  embrace, 
For  fuller  gain  of  after  bliss  ; 

That  out  of  distance  might  ensue 

Desire  of  nearness  doubly  sweet ; 

And  unto  meeting,  when  we  meet, 
Delight  a  hundredfold  accrue. 

These  contrasts  are  enough  to  mark  out  clearly,  not 
only  that  In  Memoriam  is  the  history  of  a  soul 
continued  from  point  to  point  of  change  during  nearly 
three  years,  but  also  that  it  is  the  history  of  a  soul  in 
progress  from  darkness  to  light,  from  the  selfishness  to 
the  unselfishness  of  sorrow  ;  from  despair  of  God  and 
man  to  faith  in  both  ;  and,  as  a  personal  matter,  from 
the  thought  that  friendship  was  utterly  lost  in  death 
to  the  thought  that  friendship  was  gained  through 
death  at  a  higher  level  of  love  and  with  a  deeper 
union. 

I  will  sketch  this  progress  also.  The  first  part  of  the 
poem  is  entirely  personal  to  himself  and  his  friend.     It 


220  Tennyson 

records  the  several  phases  of  sorrow — sullen  hopeless- 
ness, wild  unrest,  calm  despair,  tender  tears,  the  woes 
of  memory  and  association.  The  end  of  this  period 
comes  in  the  hidden  hope  which  arises  on  Christmas 
Day,  and  which  is  followed  by  those  lovely  verses  about 
Lazarus  and  Mary  (xxxi.,  ii.),  in  which  the  hope  of  the 
life  to  come  and  the  peace  of  love  begin  to  dawn  upon 
his  heart.  Then  follows  that  transition  time  which 
interests  the  most  those  who  care  for  intellectual  analy- 
sis. It  interests  me  therefore  the  least  of  all.  It  is  the 
least  poetical,  the  least  imaginative,  the  least  instinct 
with  beauty  and  feeling.  And  Tennyson,  while  he 
records  the  various  movements  of  his  mind  in  it,  does 
not  himself  think  much  of  them,  when  he  escapes  from 
them.  During  this  passage  of  thinking,  which  lasts 
about  a  year  and  a  half,  various  arguments  concerning 
immortality,  for  and  against,  are  put,  and  answers  at- 
tempted to  them  :  mood  after  mood  of  the  questioning 
soul  is  represented,  some  bright,  some  dark,  half  doubt, 
half  faith  ;  some  of  wonder  whether  the  living  shall 
have  life,  others  of  wonder  if  the  dead  be  alive  ;  and, 
if  so,  of  what  kind  is  their  life,  and  whether  it  touches 
ours  at  all, — a  long  period  of  argumentative  question- 
ing, useless  for  any  conclusion,  but  useful  so  far  that  the 
soul  sees  at  last  that  the  problem  of  sorrow  and  of  the 
future  life  cannot  be  personally  solved  in  the  realm  of 
argument.  Then  comes  the  crisis,  and  the  end  of  all 
the  thought,  of  all  the  doubt — so  far  as  he  has  gone — in 
that  long  and  famous  stanza  (Ixxxv.)  beginning  : 


In  Memoriam  221 


This  truth  came  borne  with  bier  and  pall, 

I  felt  it  when  I  sorrow'd  most  ; 

"r  is  better  to  have  loved  and  lost 
Than  never  to  have  loved  at  all. 

It  gathers  together  all  that  has  past.  It  establishes 
his  belief  that  his  friend  is  alive,  and  that  his 
friend's  being  is  working  in  his  own ;  that  there- 
fore he  has  now  sufficient  comfort  to  live  again  in 
other  men,  to  remember  the  mighty  hopes  that  make 
us  men.  It  is  the  beginning  of  a  new  departure,  and 
is  followed  at  once  by  the  lovely  verses,  *'  Sweet 
after  showers,  ambrosial  air,"  in  which  all  Nature 
leads  to  heavenly  peace.  Then  through  recalling 
what  his  friend  was,  he  wishes  to  see  him  as  he  is. 
"  Come  back  to  me,"  he  cries,  "  come  as  thou  art," 
and  he  begins  to  realise  that  the  dead  belong  to 
our  life,  till  (xcv.)  the  splendour  of  that  truth  is 
borne  in  upon  him,  and  Tennyson  gives  his  full 
power  to  its  expression.  This  is  a  sun-risen  piece 
of  work — the  evening,  and  the  summer  calm  upon 
the  lawn,  the  night  when  he  is  left  alone,  the  hungei 
at  his  heart  for  union,  the  reading  of  the  letters, 
and  at  last  the  passionate  intermingling  with  the  living 
soul  of  the  dead  in  waking  trance  ;  the  momen- 
tary doubt  when  the  exaltation  died,  and  then  the 
prophecy  of  the  victory,  of  light  and  life  at  hand  for 
him  in  the  coming  of  the  dawn.  Here  is  the  passage  ; 
it  is  the  embodiment  of  the  second  crisis  in  this  history 
of  the  soul : 


222  Tennyson 

So  word  by  word,  and  line  by  line, 

The  dead  man  touch'd  me  from  the  past, 
And  all  at  once  it  seem'd  at  last 

The  living  soul  was  flash'd  on  mine, 

And  mine  in  this  was  wound,  and  whirl'd 
About  empyreal  heights  of  thought, 
And  came  on  tliat  which  is,  and  caught 

The  deep  pulsations  of  the  world, 

Ionian  music  measuring  out 

The  steps  of  Time — the  shocks  of  Chance — 
The  blows  of  Death.     At  length,  my  trance 

Was  cancell'd,  stricken  thro'  with  doubt. 

Vague  words  !  but  ah,  how  hard  to  frame 
In  matter-moulded  forms  of  speech, 
Or  ev'n  for  intellect  to  reach 

Thro'  memory  that  which  I  became  : 

Till  now  the  doubtful  dusk  reveal'd 

The  knolls  once  more  where,  couch'd  at  ease 
The  white  kine  glimmer'd,  and  the  trees 

Laid  their  dark  arms  about  the  field  : 

And  suck'd  from  out  the  distant  gloom 
A  breeze  began  to  tremble  o'er 
The  large  leaves  of  the  sycamore, 

And  fluctuate  all  the  still  perfume. 

And  gathering  freshlier  overhead, 

Rock'd  the  fuU-foliaged  elms,  and  swung 
The  heavy-folded  rose,  and  flung 

The  lilies  to  and  fro,  and  said 

*'The  dawn,  the  dawn,"  and  died  away; 
And  East  and  West,  without  a  breath, 
Mixt  their  dim  lights,  like  life  and  death. 
To  broaden  into  boundless  day. 


In  Memoriam  223 


Thus  the  "  spectres  of  the  mind  "  are  laid.  In- 
deed, these  questionings  of  the  understanding  on  sub- 
jects beyond  its  powers,  and  over  Avhich  men  and 
women  worry  themselves  into  a  prolonged  infancy  of 
restlessness  or  a  senility  of  pride,  are  mere  phantasms 
which  the  intellect  creates  in  its  vanity  with  which  to 
trouble  love.  There  are  only  two  ways  of  getting  rid 
of  them — one  is  the  way  that  Tennyson  pictures  in  his 
own  fashion  in  the  rest  of  /;/  Memoriam — the  way  of 
love  and  of  faith  following  on  love — and  all  may  read 
it  there,  expressed  in  pure  art,  and  in  a  series  of  short 
poems  which  are  as  lovely  in  form  as  they  are  in 
feeling,  as  full  of  the  higher  human  passion  as  they 
are  of  an  exquisite  sentiment  for  the  beauty  of  Na- 
ture, and  so  closely  knit  together  by  spiritual  joy  that 
they — rising  incessantly  from  point  to  point  of  universal 
love — form  a  single  poem.  It  is  the  triumphal  march 
of  Love.     It  is  also  a  triumph  of  art. 

The  other  way  of  getting  rid  of  these  questionings 
of  the  understanding  concerning  those  things  which  it 
never  can  prove  is  to  entirely  empty  the  mind  of  them, 
abandon  all  care  for  anything  beyond  this  present  world. 
It  is  a  way  many  take,  and  it  has  its  advantages.  It  sets 
the  mind  free  to  give  itself  wholly  to  the  practical  busi- 
ness, as  it  is  called,  of  life.  But  it  has  also  a  disad- 
vantage which  may  be  excessively  unpractical.  It  leaves 
the  soul  empty  of  the  ideas  which  carry  a  man  and 
his  work  beyond  this  world,  and  which  link  all  the 
history   and  end  of  mankind  to  a  wider  history,  and  to 


2  24  Tennyson 

an  eternal  life.  It  leaves  personal  love  forlorn,  and 
human  love  for  all  men  in  the  arms  of  death.  The  his- 
tory of  the  universal  love  of  man  is  made  by  it  a  history 
of  universal  death. 

Many  persons  stand  that  easily.  It  does  not  trouble 
them,  but  I  do  not  know  any  poet,  even  the  most  de- 
spairing, who  does  not  at  times  soar  above  it  or  regret 
it.  At  least,  Tennyson  could  not  endure  it,  and  he  was 
never  satisfied  till  he  had  left  it  behind  him.  "  Power 
was  with  me,"  he  cries,  "  in  the  night  "  ;  and  in  the  rush 
of  love  by  which  he  clasped  to  his  spirit  the  living 
being  of  his  dead  friend,  faith  in  life  filled  his  heart.  "  I 
cannot  understand,"  he  said,  "  but  I  love."  This  in  the 
beginning  of  his  victory  ;  and  as  love  creates  life  and 
joy  wheresoever  it  moves,  all  things  change  now  to  the 
poet.  The  whole  of  Nature  breathes  and  thrills  of  his 
friend  ;  every  memory  of  him,  while  they  walked  amidst 
her  beauty,  is  happy. 

No  gray  old  grange,  or  lonely  fold, 
Or  low  morass  and  whispering  reed, 
Or  simple  stile  from  mead  to  mead, 

Or  sheep-walk  up  the  windy  wold  ; 

Nor  hoary  knoll  of  ash  or  haw 
That  hears  the  latest  linnet  trill, 
Nor  quarry  trench'd  along  the  hill, 

And  haunted  by  the  wrangling  daw  ; 

Nor  runlet  trickling  from  the  rock  ; 
Nor  pastoral  rivulet  that  swerves 
To  left  and  right  thro'  meadowy  curves, 

That  feed  the  mothers  of  the  flock  ; 


In  Memoriam  225 


But  each  has  pleased  a  kindred  eye, 
And  each  reflects  a  kindlier  day  ; 
And  leaving  these,  to  pass  away, 

I  think  once  more  he  seems  to  die. 


All  humanity  also  opens  before  him,  filled  with  hopes 

that  will  not  shame  themselves.     It  is  here  that  "  Ring 

out  wild  bells"  comes   into  the  poem,  "Ring  out   the 

thousand  wars  of   old,   ring  in  the  thousand  years  of 

peace  "  ;  and  with  this  universal  hope,  impulse  to  make 

his  sorrow  into  love  for  man  deepens  his  heart.     "  I  will 

not  shut  me  from  my  kind,"  he  sings,   "  nor  feed  with 

sighs  the  passing  wind."     Then,  that  he  may  know  how 

he  ought  to  live  for  man,  he  draws,  in  a  succession  of 

short  poems,  the  picture  of  his  friend's  character  and  of 

how  he  would  have  lived  for  the  race.     And  out  of  it  all 

arises  this — That  knowledge  is  needed  to  save  the  world 

from  its  outward  and  inward  pain,  but  that  knowledge  is 

not  enough.      Wisdom,  such  as   Arthur  had,   must  be 

added  to  knowledge,  and  must  rule  it ;  and  wisdom  is  of 

things   that   Love   knows,   but    that    knowledge  cannot 

know.     "  Come  then,  my  friend,  enter  into  me  ;  quicken 

me  with  this  wisdom  of  thine  ;  let  love  be  all  in  all  in 

me.     I  could  not  find  God  alive,  nor  my  friend,  in  the 

questionings  of  the  understanding,  but  now  I  love  and  I 

have  found  them  both — found  God,  and  my  friend  in 

God.     And  with  them  I  have  found  life,  life  for  myself 

and  life  for  all  my  brother  men.     I  see  the  progress  of 

the  world  as  I  have  seen  my  own  progress  ;  I  see  the 

working  of  love  in  the  evolution  of  mankind  ;  T  see  our- 
15 


226  Tennyson 

selves  labouring  on,  and  our  labour  useful  and  lovely 
when  it  is  for  others  ;  and,  lastly,  I  see  the  great  labour 
of  God's  love  underlying  all  and  moving  to  a  perfect 
close." 

And  all,  as  in  some  piece  of  art, 
Is  toil  co-operant  to  an  end. 

And  the  conclusion  that  sums  the  whole  is  a  solemn 
prayer  to  God  that  all  the  world  may  conquer,  as  he 
has  conquered,  the  besieging  years,  and  the  powers  of 
sorrow. 

O  living  will,  that  shalt  endure 

When  all  that  seems  shall  suffer  shock, 
Rise  in  the  spiritual  rock, 

Flow  thro'  our  deeds  and  make  them  pure, 

That  we  may  lift  from  out  the  dust 

A  voice  as  unto  him  that  hears, 

A  cry  above  the  conquer'd  years 
To  one  that  with  us  works,  and  trust. 

With  faith  that  comes  of  self-control. 
The  truths  that  never  can  be  proved 
Until  we  close  with  all  we  loved, 

And  all  we  flow  from,  soul  in  soul. 

Nine  years  after  Arthur  Hallam's  death,  Tennyson's 
sister  was  married,  and  he  writes  her  marriage  song  as 
the  epilogue  to  his  poem.  We  see  then  what  was  his 
temper  of  mind  in  1842.  Had  he  gone  back,  had  he 
lost  the  fruits  of  the  victory  he  had  won  ?  Love  is  not 
less,  he  says,  but  more.     It  is  solid-set  like  a  statue  ;  it 


In  Memoriam  22 


is  moulded  into  calm  of  soul,  all  passion  spent,  and  he 
has  himself  grown  into  something  greater  than  before  ; 
so  that  his  songs  of  dead  regret  seem  "  echoes  out  of 
weaker  times."  It  is  not  that  he  loves  his  friend  less, 
but  that  his  friend  is  with  him  so  closely,  in  so  vivid  a 
life  and  with  so  great  a  power — being  as  it  were  a  nart 
of  God  and  of  the  life  of  God  in  him — that  only  joy 
remains. 

Even  as  he  sits  at  the  wedding-feast,  he  feels  Arthur 
with  them,  wishing  joy.  And  then,  as  before,  he  passes 
from  the  personal,  from  the  peace  of  home  and  its  shel- 
ter, to  think  of  the  greater  world  of  man,  of  the  nobler 
race  which  God  is  making  out  of  ours.  He  retires  when 
night  falls,  and  looks  out  on  the  skies  as  the  moon  rises. 
"  Touch  with  thy  shade  and  splendour,"  he  cries,  the 
bridal  doors  ;  let  a  soul  from  their  marriage  draw  from 
out  the  vast,  and  strike  his  being  into  bounds,  and  be  a 
closer  link  betwixt  us  and  the  crowning  race,  the  higher 
humanity  to  be,  of  which  my  friend  (and  he  sweeps 
back,  enamoured  of  unity  like  a  poet,  to  the  first  subject 
of  In  Memoriam)  was  a  noble  type — the  race  to  the 
making  of  which  God  is  moving  forward  the  whole  crea- 
tion. Thus  he  ends  with  the  universal,  with  the  reitera- 
tion of  the  victory  of  man  over  pain  in  the  eternity  of 
the  love  of  God  : 


That  God,  which  ever  lives  and  loves, 
One  God,  one  law,  one  element, 
And  one  far-off  divine  event, 

To  which  the  whole  creation  move*. 


228  Tennyson 

Seven  years  then  passed  by,  during  which  Tennyson 
still  revised  his  poem,  during  which  his  spirit  was  con- 
tinually kept  close  to  the  conclusions  of  faith  and  hope 
and  love,  and  of  love  the  greatest  of  these  three,  to 
which  he  liad  come  in  /;/  Memoriatn.  How  would  he 
feel  towards  these  when  so  long  a  term  of  years  had 
come  to  an  end  ?  We  have  an  answer  to  that  question 
in  the  prologue  to  the  poem  written  in  1849.  Every 
conclusion  heliad  come  to  is  confirmed  and  re-expressed 
in  that  profound  and  religious  psalm.  All  that  he  loved, 
hoped  for,  and  believed,  is  there  laid  in  the  hands,  held 
in  the  grace,  and  enshrined  in  the  spirit  of  Him  who  is 
"  Immortal  Love." 


CHAPTER   IX 

"  MAUD  "   AND   THE   WAR-POEMS 

THE  main  point  concerning  Tennyson  himself  on 
which  I  dwelt  in  the  last  chapter  was  that  he  had 
freed  himself  in  that  poem  from  the  merely  per- 
sonal. He  has  passed  in  In  Memoriarn  from  the  particu- 
lar to  the  universal.  Before  he  had  finished  that  poem, 
the  pain  of  the  world  of  man  had  flowed  into  his  soul. 
He  had  reached  full  manhood  in  his  art.  From  this 
time  forth  then,  from  1850,  when  Tennyson  was  just 
over  forty  years  of  age,  a  vaster  emotion  belongs  to  his 
poetry,  the  solemn  swell  of  the  passion  of  mankind  ; 
yet  the  poetry  does  not  lose,  when  he  desires  it,  its  happy 
brightness.  The  idyll  of  The  Brook,  published  along 
with  Maud,  is  as  gay  as  it  is  gentle.  Then,  too,  though 
his  poetry  has  thus  more  than  before  to  do  with  the 
larger  life  of  man,  he  can  still  see  Nature  with  the  keen 
sight  and  enjoyment  of  youth.  Moreover,  he  can  still 
"  follow  the  Gleam,"  still  breathe  with  ease  the  ideal  air, 
though  his  experience  has  been  sad,  though  maturer 
years  have  led  hirr  to  keep  closer  in  his  work  to  the 
facts  of  real  life. 

229 


230  Tennyson 

His  poetry  has  certainly  lost  some  of  the  animation, 
opulence,  unconsciousness  in  singing,  which  are  qualities 
of  youth — of  which  qualities,  however,  he  seemed  to 
have  less  than  other  poets,  because  graver  qualities,  un- 
usual in  youth,  balanced  them  ;  but  it  has  gained  more 
character  ;  it  knows  itself  better  ;  it  has  more  of  the 
wisdom  of  life  in  it — and  yet  it  has  not  lost  passion. 
Nay,  that  is  more  profound  ;  there  is  a  greater  general 
intensity  of  feeling  on  subjects  worthy  of  deep  regard. 
Moreover,  the  same  width  and  depth  of  feeling  with 
which  he  wrote  about  religion  in  In  Memoriam  now 
extended  itself  over  the  movements  of  the  world.  He 
is  in  closer  sympathy  with  the  life  of  England  at  home 
and  abroad.  The  stories  of  the  joys  and  sorrows  of  men 
and  women  which  he  took  as  subjects  in  1842  {Dora 
and  the  rest)  are  now  continued,  but  the  colours  in  which 
he  paints  them  are  fuller  and  deeper  in  hue,  and  they  are 
also  more  various.  He  writes  of  the  farmer,  the  sailor, 
the  city  clerk,  the  parson  and  lawyer  and  squire. 
Enoch  A  r  den  J  Ayhners  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook, 
The  Grafidmother,  The  Northern  Farmer,  The  Sailor 
Boy  prove  with  what  variety  and  power  and  charm  he 
wrought  at  this  vein,  and  he  loved  to  work  in  it  to  the 
very  end. 

But  it  was  not  only  English  life  at  home  which  en- 
gaged him.  He  followed  up  that  life  abroad.  Rumours 
of  war  and  war  itself,  after  1850,  stirred  his  heart.  The 
patriotic  spirit  which  he  felt  so  strongly  all  his  life  was 
now  awakened,  first  by  the  threatening  aspect  of  France, 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         231 

then  by  the  death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  and  then 
by  the  Crimean  war.  Three  short  poems,  written  in 
1852,  and  published  in  the  newspapers,  belong  to  the 
French  menace  :  Britons,  Guard  your  Own  !  The  Third 
of  February .'  and  Hands  all  round  ;  God  the  tyrant's  cause 
confound !  They  are  sturdy,  full-bodied  things,  and  The 
Third  of  February  maintained  against  our  shameless 
alliance  with  the  Man  of  December  the  moral  censure 
of  England  on  his  murderous  work  : 

What  !  have  we  fought  for  Freedom  from  our  prime, 
At  last  to  dodge  and  palter  with  a  public  crime  ? 

We  are  grateful  to  Tennyson  for  these  words,  though 
afterwards  he  seemed  to  be  a  partisan  of  the  war  in 
which  the  Third  Napoleon  became  the  comrade  in  arms 
of  England.  But  we  may  pardon  him  for  that,  for  it 
was  his  long  hatred  of  Russia  for  her  bloody  work  in 
Poland  which  was  at  the  root  of  his  approval  of  the 
Crimean  war.  This  patriotism  had  soon  a  noble  subject 
in  the  praise  of  the  great  Duke.  Tennyson  issued  his 
Ode  on  the  day  of  Wellington's  burial,  and  republished 
it  a  year  after  with  many  notable  changes.  This  is  one 
of  his  finest  poems.  It  was  fitting  that  the  foremost  man 
in  England,  who  had  worn  his  honours  with  a  quiet  sim- 
plicity for  so  many  years  in  the  "  fierce  light  "  which 
shines  on  a  world-wide  fame,  and  in  whom  the  light 
never  found  anything  mean  or  fearful,  should,  after  his 
death,  receive  this  great  and  impassioned  tribute.  What 
he  did   in   politics  was  always    questionable.     He   was 


232  Tennyson 

nothing  of  a  statesman,  as  Tennyson  calls  him.  He 
proved  his  inability  when  he  was  called  to  the  Premier- 
ship. Then  he  was  first  arrogant,  and  afterwards  per- 
plexed by  the  mischief  he  wrought.  Indeed,  he  was 
profoundly  ignorant  of  England  ;  but,  when  he  found 
out  his  ignorance,  he  had  the  good  sense  of  a  great 
general.  He  knew  when  to  retreat,  and  he  retreated, 
even  though  his  retreat  had  the  appearance  of  a  flight. 
He  stood  "four-square  to  all  the  winds  that  blew,"  but 
when  all  the  winds  became  one  wind,  he  opened  the 
doors  to  it  and  bade  the  Crown  and  his  peers  give  way. 
This  was  the  wisest  thing  he  did  in  his  old  age,  and  it  is 
somewhat  characteristic  of  Tennyson  that,  except  in  one 
line,  "  rich  in  saving  common  sense,"  he  takes  no  notice 
of  it  at  all. 

"  Let  all  England  mourn  her  greatest  son,  let  all 
England  thank  God  for  him,  and  bury  him  with  honour 
upon  honour  " — that  is  the  motive  of  the  beginning  of 
the  poem  ;  and  it  is  worthy  to  be  felt  by  a  poet  and 
by  a  nation.  Magnanimity  and  magnificence,  great- 
mindedness  and  great-doing,  are  the  life-blood  of  a 
people.  To  celebrate  them  with  a  lavish  splendour 
when  he  who  embodied  them  in  life  is  dead,  is  a  lesson 
in  a  people's  education.  Then  Tennyson  passes  to  the 
Duke's  glory  in  war,  and  perhaps  in  all  commemora- 
tive odes  there  is  nothing  finer  than  his  imagination  of 
Nelson  waking  from  his  grave  in  St.  Paul's  and  wonder- 
ing who  was  coming,  with  this  national  mourning,  to  lie 
beside  him  : 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems  233 

"  Who  is  he  that  cometh,  like  an  honour'd  guest, 

With  banner  and  with  music,  with  soldier  and  with  priest, 

With  a  nation  weeping,  and  breaking  on  my  rest  ?  " 

Mighty  Seaman,  this  is  he 

Was  great  by  land  as  thou  by  sea. 

This  is  he  that  far  away 
Against  the  myriads  of  Assaye 
Clash'd  with  his  fiery  few  and  won  ; 

and  the  poet,  starting  from  this  early  battle,  sketches 
with  rapid  and  clear  pencil  the  great  wars  till  the  day  of 
Waterloo.  I  wish  the  division  of  the  poem  (vii.)  begin- 
ning— 

A  people's  voice  !  we  are  a  people  yet — 

were  excluded  from  the  poem.  But  that  would  be  to 
wish  away  one  of  Tennyson's  most  characteristic  utter- 
ances as  a  patriot.  Nevertheless,  it  is  too  exclusively 
English,  too  controversial,  too  much  an  attack  on  France, 
too  contemptuous  of  the  people  whom  he  sees  only  as 
the  mob  ;  too  fond  of  the  force  of  great  men  to  the  ex- 
clusion of  the  force  of  the  collective  movements  of  the 
nation.  A  great  artist  should  not  overstep  so  much  the 
limits  of  temperance  ;  or,  to  put  this  otherwise,  he  should 
not  lose  his  sympathy  with  the  whole  of  humanity  in  his 
sympathy  with  his  own  country. 

This  is,  however,  as  great  a  poem  as  the  character 
was  which  it  celebrated.  The  metrical  movement 
rushes    on    where    it   ought    to    rush,    delays    where    it 


2  34  Tennyson 

ought  to  delay.  Were  the  poem  set  by  Handel, 
its  rhythmical  movements  could  scarcely  be  more  fit 
from  point  to  point  to  the  things  spoken  off,  more  full 
of  stately,  happy  changes.  Moreover,  the  conduct  of 
the  piece  is  excellent.  It  swells  upwards  in  fuller  har- 
mony and  growing  thought  till  it  reaches  its  climax  in 
the  division  (vi.)  about  Nelson  and  Wellington.  Then 
it  slowly  passes  downwards  in  solemn  strains  like  a  storm 
dying  in  the  sky,  and  at  the  end  closes  in  soft  spiritual 
passages  of  ethereal  sound,  like  the  lovely  clouds  about 
the  setting  sun  when  the  peace  of  evening  has  fallen  on 
a  tempestuous  day.  Its  conduct  is  then  the  conduct  of 
one  form  of  the  true  lyric,  that  whose  climax  is  in  the 
midst,  and  not  at  the  close. 

During  the  years  which  followed  this  poem  Tennyson's 
mind  was  kept  close  to  the  subject  of  war,  though  his 
dislike  to  France  had  to  be  placed  in  abeyance,  for  these 
were  the  years  of  the  Crimean  war.  In  1854  the  news 
of  the  splendid  and  foolish  charge  of  the  Light  Brigade 
reached  the  country,  and  set  it  all  on  fire.  When  it  was 
made,  and  a  petulant  mistake  had  all  but  annihilated  the 
Brigade,  we  forgot  the  folly  in  the  glory  of  those  who 
rode  so  steadily  to  all  but  certain  death.  Steady  obedi- 
ence, cool  self-sacrifice,  disbelief  in  the  impossible, 
courage  which  rises  higher  the  nearer  death  is  at  hand, 
are  some  of  the  things  which  have  made  England. 
They  made  her  glory  in  this  deed  of  war.  It  was  more 
the  glory  of  the  troopers  than  of  the  leader,  and  Tenny- 
son has  felt  that  throughout  his  song.     And  since  he  felt 


"  Maud"  and  the  War-Poems         235 

it,  I  wish  that  he  had  celebrated  Inkerman  rather  than 
this  isolated  and  splendid  blunder.  Nevertheless,  it  was 
a  fine  thing  done  in  the  face  of  the  whole  world,  and  it 
has  handed  down  so  great  a  tradition  of  mortal  courage 
and  magnificence  that  it  was  well  worthy  of  song,  and 
Tennyson  could  hardly  help  taking  it  as  a  poetic  theme. 
He  did  it  well  ;  but  the  weakness  inherent  in  the  subject 
("  some  one  had  blundered  ")  prevented  him  from  doing 
it  very  well. 

In  after  years  he  took  another  subject  of  the  same  kind, 
and  out  of  the  same  battle — The  Charge  of  the  Heavy 
Brigade  at  Balaclava.  The  poem  has  its  own  force,  but 
it  is  too  like  its  predecessor.  It  first  appeared  in  1882, 
and  was  published  with  a  prologue  and  epilogue  in  1885. 
The  prologue  is  addressed  to  General  Hamley,  and 
contains  a  charming  description  of  the  view  from  his 
Sussex  home,  and  an  allusion  to  the  glory  of  the  war  in 
Egypt  against  Arabi.  But  it  is  the  epilogue  which  it  is 
right  to  notice  in  this  place,  for  it  contains  his  defence 
of  his  war-poems  against  Irene,  who  stands,  I  suppose, 
for  Peace,  but  who  is  with  all  a  poet's  love  of  the 
personal,  made  into  a  delightful  girl. 

You  wrong  me,  passionate  little  friend. 

I  would  that  wars  should  cease, 
I  would  the  globe  from  end  to  end 

Might  sow  and  reap  in  peace. 

Yes,  Tennyson  loved  peace,  and  has  sung  of  it  with 
grace  and  loveliness  ;  but  the  objection  men  have  taken 
to  the  praise  of  war  in  Maud  is   none  the  less.     War  is 


236  Tennyson 

lield  in  Maud  to  ])c  the  i)roper  cure  for  the  evils  of 
peace,  and  it  is  not  a  cure,  but  an  additional  disease. 
In  this  defence  also,  he  still  clings  to  the  notion  that 
Trade,  "  with  kindly  links  of  gold,"  may  refrain  the 
Powers  from  war,  when  Trade,  as  at  present  conducted, 
is  the  most  fruitful  cause  of  war.  Moreover,  he  sees,  in 
this  defence,  no  way  of  making  true  peace  but  fighting, 
meeting  force  by  force.  A  poet  might  have  thought  of 
other  ways  ;  yet  it  was  scarcely  possible  that  Tennyson, 
with  his  character,  should  have  seen  those  other  ways. 
We  must  not  expect  from  a  man  that  which  is  beyond 
his  nature  ;  and  therefore  we  accept  with  gratitude  his 
declaration  in  this  epilogue — 

And  who  loves  War  for  War's  own  sake 
Is  fool,  or  crazed,  or  worse. 

There  is  no  one  also  who  will  not  agree  with  the  view 
expressed  at  the  end  of  the  epilogue — that  it  is  right, 
even  though  the  realm  be  in  the  wrong  in  the  war,  "  to 
crown  with  song  the  warrior's  noble  deed." 

And  here  the  Singer  for  his  Art 

Not  all  in  vain  may  plead 
"  The  song  that  nerves  a  nation's  heart, 

Is  in  itself  a  deed." 

This  is  truth  he  sings,  and  it  makes  us  wish  that  he 
had  written  more  war-lyrics  on  the  noble  gests  of 
Englishmen.  He  did  write  two  extraordinarily  fine 
things — The  Fight  of  the  Revenge  and   The  Defence  of 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems  237 

Lucknow,  but  the  latter  is  a  little  too  detailed,  a  little  too 
historical. 

The  Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade  was  written  in  1854. 
In  the  year  following,  Maud  appeared.  The  war  ele- 
ment continues  to  live  in  this  poem,  and  its  presence 
does  not  improve,  but  injures  it.  War  presides  at  its 
conception,  is  inwoven  with  it,  and  directs  its  end.  The 
beginning  of  the  poem,  which  attacks,  in  the  mouth  of 
a  nervous,  slothful  man,  the  evils  of  a  world  whose 
only  god  is  commerce  and  whose  goddess  is  com- 
petition, is  written  with  apparently  the  direct  purpose 
of  holding  up,  at  the  close,  war  as  the  remedy  for 
those  evils. 

For  I  trust  if  an  enemy's  fleet  came  yonder  round  by  the  hill, 

And  the  rushing  battle-bolt  sang  from  the  three-decker  out  of  the 

foam, 
That  the  smooth-faced,  snub-nosed  rogue  would  leap  from  his  counter 

and  till. 
And  strike,  if  he  could,  were  it  but   with  his  cheating  yard-wand, 

home. 

This  is  said  in  the  character  of  the  spleenful  hero,  but 
yet  the  verse  is  Tennyson's  own.  The  war  waged  then 
would  be  in  defence  of  hearth  and  home — a  just  war. 
But  the  Crimean  war  was  not  in  that  category.  And  the 
poem  ends  with  that  war  as  the  cure  for  the  evils  of 
peace.  There  is  too  little  distinction  made  between  war 
and  war. 

Further  on,  the  death  of  Maud's  brother  in  a  duel  at 
the  hand  of  Maud's  lover,  which  dissolves  the  love  story 


238  Tennyson 

in  catastrophe,  contrasts  the  sin  of  private  war  with  the 
nobility  of  public  war  for  a  worthy  cause.  The  mad- 
ness caused  by  this  private  revenge  is  healed  by  the 
lover  joining  the  national  effort  to  right  a  wrong.  The 
social  war  of  competition  is  to  be  also  healed  by  the 
spirit  of  sacrifice  in  the  nation  which  is  aroused  by  a 
public  war.  The  whole  of  this,  as  I  have  said  before, 
is  a  great  pity.  Moreover,  this  part  of  the  subject  is 
artistically  unfortunate,  for  the  Crimean  war  was  the  most 
foolish,  the  most  uncalled  for,  and  the  least  deliberate 
of  all  our  wars.  It  mixed  us  up  with  the  Emperor  of  the 
French,  a  miserable  companionship  for  a  country  which 
desired  honour  and  freedom.  Its  management  at  first 
was  a  disgrace  to  the  War  Office  of  England.  The  sub- 
ject, then,  of  the  poem  was  radically  bad  so  far  as  the 
war-element  in  it  was  concerned,  and  this  acted  not  only 
on  those  parts  of  the  poem  which  belonged  to  the  war, 
but  also,  even  without  the  artist's  consciousness  of  it, 
disturbed  the  beauty  of  the  whole,  and  weakened  the 
emotional  impression  he  desired  his  work  to  make.  An 
element,  troubling  to  art,  underlies  the  handling  and  the 
conduct  of  the  poem. 

But,  in  spite  of  this,  Maud,  in  its  joy  and  sorrow  alike, 
is  the  loveliest  of  Tennyson's  longer  poems.  It  does  not 
possess  much  natural  description.  We  see  the  landscape 
only  in  allusions,  but  it  is  clear  enough.  Above  is  the 
moor-land,  dark  purple  ;  below  is  the  shore  and  the 
loud-resounding  sea,  whose  restless  waves  in  storm 
thunder  on  the  pebbled  beach.     Between  the  moor  and 


"  Maud"  and  the  War-Poems  239 

the  sea,  on  the  low  ground,  are  the  village  and  the  vil- 
lage church,  "  gables  and  spire  together  "  ;  and  on  the 
hillside  the  hall  and  garden  where  Maud  lives  ;  and  not 
far  off  the  lover's  house,  a  haunted  place,  near  which  is 
a  flowery  wood  and  a  dark  red  sandstone  hollow  in  the 
hill.  This  is  the  scene  where  so  fateful  a  passion  is 
played,  and  there  is  not  much  of  Nature  in  it.  But  here 
and  there  throughout  the  poem  there  are  separate  touches 
full  of  observation  :  * 

A  million  emeralds  break  from  the  ruby-budded  lime, 

is  as  faithful  to  the  colour,  as  this  which  follows  is  to  the 
sound  of  the  thing  described  : 

Just  now  the  dry-tongued  laurels'  pattering  talk 
Seem'd  her  light  foot  along  the  garden  walk. 

He  saw  every  year  the  temper  of  a  south-coast  gale  and 
the  look  of  the  sky  : 

Morning  arises  stormy  and  pale, 

No  sun,  but  a  wannish  glare 

In  fold  upon  fold  of  hueless  cloud, 

And  the  budded  peaks  of  the  wood  are  bow'd. 

Caught  and  cuffed  by  the  gale  : 

I  had  fancied  it  would  be  fair. 

*  Nothing  can  be  closer  to  truth  than  the  line 

'*  The  scream  of  a  madden'd  beach  dragg'd  down  by  the  wave  ;  " 

but  it  is  only  true  for  the  beach  of  the  southern  coast  where  the  sea- 
rounded  pebbles  of  the  chalk,  piled  in  loose  banks  on  the  shore,  are 
rolled  over  and  over,  grating  and  grinding,  by  the  retreating  wave. 


240  Tennyson 

Contrast  with  this  wild  cloudy  morning  the  quiet  pure 
sky  of  a  night  in  spring — fitted,  as  it  is,  to  the  dark  calm 
which  had  followed  the  lover's  madness  : 

My  mood  is  changed,  for  it  fell  at  a  time  of  year 

When  the  face  of  night  is  fair  on  the  dewy  downs, 

And  the  shining  daffodil  dies,  and  the  Charioteer 

And  starry  Gemini  hang  like  glorious  crowns 

Over  Orion's  grave  low  down  in  the  west, 

That  like  a  silent  lightning  under  the  stars 

She  seem'd  to  divide  in  a  dream  from  a  band  of  the  blest. 

These  are  broad  sketches,  but  Tennyson  can  do  the 
most  minute  and  finest  drawing,  and  no  better  example 
exists  of  it  than  the  description  of  the  tiny  shell  the 
lover  finds  on  the  beach.  The  shell  is  dead,  but  the 
poet's  animating  hand  cannot  bear  that  it  should  be  life- 
less ;  and  he  images,  with  the  finest  sympathy,  with  orna- 
menting love,  its  last  inhabitant  : 

The  tiny  cell  is  forlorn, 
Void  of  the  little  living  will 
That  made  it  stir  on  the  shore. 
Did  he  stand  at  the  diamond  door 
Of  his  house  in  a  rainbow  frill  ? 
Did  he  push,  when  he  was  uncurl'd, 
A  golden  foot  or  a  fairy  horn 
Thro'  his  dim  water-world  ? 

These  are  direct  descriptions  of  Nature,  but  Maud  is 
remarkable,  even  among  the  other  poems,  for  the  deter- 
mined way  in  which  Nature  is  charged  in  it  with  the 
human   passions.     The  hollow  where  the  lover's  ruined 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         241 

father  slew  himself  is  red,  flower  and  rock,  to  the  eyes  of 
his  son. 

Its  lips  in  the  field  above  are  dabbled  with  blood-red  heath, 
The  red-ribb'd  ledges  drip  with  a  silent  horror  of  blood. 

He  had  lost  his  fortune  by  speculation,  wherefore,  when 
he  walked  out, 

the  wind  like  a  broken  worldling  wail'd, 
And  the  flying  gold  of  the  ruin'd  woodlands  drove  through  the 
air. 

When  the  lover  first  hopes  for  Maud's  love,  every  bird 
in  the  sky  cries  to  her  and  calls  to  her  ;  the  daisies  that 
her  foot  touches  are  rose-tinted  by  her  touch.  All  the 
world  from  west  to  east,  all  the  seas,  blush  with  joy 
when  she  is  on  the  point  of  yielding.  The  great  cedar 
that  sighs  for  Lebanon  sighs  no  more,  for  it  is  haunted 
by  her  starry  head,  over  whom 

thy  darkness  must  have  spread 
With  such  delight  as  theirs  of  old,  thy  great 
Forefathers  of  the  thornless  garden,  there 
Shadowing  the  snow-limb'd  Eve  from  whom  she  came. 

The  stars,  feeling  with  his  joy,  go  in  and  out  on  the 
heavens  with  merry  play. 

A  livelier  emerald  twinkles  on  the  grass, 
A  purer  sapphire  melts  into  the  sea. 

The  swell  of  the  long  waves  on  the  shore  is  enchanted  ; 

and  in   that  lovely  song,  when  her  lover  waits  for  Maud 

in  the  dawn,  and  the  planet  of  love  begins 
16 


242  Tennyson 

to  faint  in  the  light  that  she  loves 
On  a  bed  of  daffodil  sky, 

he  transfers  all  the  passion  of  his  heart  to  the  flowers 
and  the  flowers  become  part  of  his  heart.  "  The  soul 
of  the  rose  went  into  my  blood."  The  lilies  kept  awake 
all  night  with  him.  When  she  is  coming  at  last,  the 
garden  speaks  for  him  : 

There  has  fallen  a  splendid  tear 

From  the  passion-flower  at  the  gate. 
She  is  coming,  my  dove,  my  dear  : 

She  is  coming,  my  life,  my  fate  ; 
The  red  rose  cries — "  She  is  near,  she  is  near"  ; 

And  the  white  rose  weeps — "  She  is  late"  ; 
The  larkspur  listens — "  I  hear,  I  hear"  ; 

And  the  lily  whispers — "  I  wait." 

No  example  can  be  better  of  this  method  by  which 
Nature  is  made  the  reflection  and  illustration  of  a  human 
soul,  except  perhaps  this  beautiful  thing — 

From  the  meadow  your  walks  have  left  so  sweet 

That  whenever  a  March  wind  sighs 
He  sets  the  jewel-print  of  your  feet 

In  violets  blue  as  your  eyes, 
To  the  woody  hollows  in  which  we  meet 

And  the  valleys  of  Paradise. 

As  to  the  upbuilding  of  the  poem,  Tennyson  called  it 
a  Monodrama.  The  story,  though  very  simple,  is  capable 
of  bringing  together  a  host  of  complex  feelings,  and  in  the 
one  character  of  the  hero  they  all  clash  into  a  drama  of 
the  soul.     Fate,  too,  broods  over  it  from  the  beginning. 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         243 

Given  the  characters  of  Maud  and  her  lover,  and  the 
events  that  preceded  their  love,  the  tragedy  is  inevi- 
table. This  is  a  justly  dramatic  situation.  We  expect 
the  ruin  ;  and  the  transient  happiness  of  the  lovers  only 
renders  it  more  pitiable.  But  the  openly  dramatic  part 
of  the  poem  ends  with  the  first  part  where  Maud's 
brother  is  slain  by  her  lover,  and  the  girl  dies  of  the 
double  pain.  The  second  part  is  the  result  of  this 
catastrophe  on  the  life  of  the  hero — his  flight,  his  mad- 
ness, and  the  resurrection  of  his  manliness.  The  dra- 
matic element  in  this  part  is  in  the  mind  of  the  lover — in 
the  involution  and  struggle  of  the  sane  and  insane  in 
him. 

The  hero  is  a  nervous,  affectionate,  half-hysterical 
person,  often  gentle,  often  violent  from  weakness  ;  who 
lives  on  the  edge  of  the  supernatural  ;  morbidly  excited 
by  the  suicide  of  his  father,  by  his  lonely  life,  and  by 
brooding  in  inaction  on  those  iniquities  of  commerce 
which  ruined  his  father,  and  which  he  imputes  to  the 
whole  of  society.  The  roots  of  his  hair  are  stirred  when 
his  father's  corse  is  brought  home  at  night.  He  hears  the 
dead  moaning  in  his  house  at  noon,  and  his  own  name 
called  in  the  silence.  The  physical  irritability  transfers 
itself  to  his  moral  world,  and  becomes  a  weak  anger 
with  man  and  God  without  one  effort  to  meet  the  evils 
at  which  he  screams.  His  first  utterance  in  the  poem 
is  a  long  shriek  in  a  high  falsetto  note  against  the  wrongs 
and  curses  which  come  of  a  vile  peace.  "  Is  it  peace  or 
war  ?  "  he  cries  :  "  better  war  !  loud  war  bv  land  and  sea." 


244  Tennyson 

And  then  he  thinks  of  Maud,  who  was  his  playmate. 
She  is  coming  home.  "  What  is  she  now  ?  My  dreams 
are  bad.  She  may  bring  me  a  curse."  When  Maud 
comes,  his  diseased  pride  pictures  her  as  cold  and  con- 
temptuous, while  his  heart  is  thrilled  by  her  charm.  Pride 
and  first  love  are  at  a  variance,  and  he  has  no  strength 
to  decide  between  them.  Now  one,  now  the  other  gains 
the  mastery.  And  in  the  strife,  he  breaks  into  fury  with 
the  world  again.  All  men  and  women  are  slanderers 
and  cheats,  and  Nature  is  one  with  rapine.  "  The  whole 
little  wood  where  I  sit  is  a  world  of  plunder  and  prey." 
And  we  are  puppets  in  the  hand  of  an  unseen  power, 
and  degraded  puppets.  Nature  and  man  and  God, 
if  there  be  a  God,  are  all  bad. 

On  this  shattered  character  Maud  dawns  like  the 
morning  ;  fresh,  simple,  and  young,  full  of  gentle  feeling, 
easily  won  to  love  ;  romantic,  having  her  Avomanhood  in 
a  sweet  purity  and  grace,  but  as  yet  with  no  character — 
characterless,  like  Miranda.  And  her  joyousness  breaks 
in  on  his  gloom.     He  hears  her  singing  : 

A  passionate  ballad  gallant  and  gay, 
A  martial  song  like  a  trumpet's  call. 
Singing  alone  in  the  morning  of  life, 
In  the  happy  morning  of  life  and  of  May. 

Singing  of  honour  and  death  in  battle — for  now  the  war 
motive  steals  in — till  he  is  ready  to  weep  for  a  sordid 
time,  and  for  his  own  base  languor.  From  that  moment 
their  love  runs  on  from  point  to  point.  His  character 
forbids    him    to    believe    in    her  ;    yet    he    cannot   but 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         245 

believe  in  her  a  little,  for  love  has  mastered  him. 
Jealousy  comes  next,  and  in  the  turmoil  within  he 
recognises  that  he  is  not  a  true  man.  It  is  a  man  the 
country  wants,  some  strong  man  to  rule  it  ;  it  is  a  man 
he  needs  himself  to  be,  and  the  midmost  motive  of  the 
poem  is  in  the  lines  : 

And  ah  for  a  man  to  arise  in  me, 
That  the  man  I  am  may  cease  to  be  ! 

Then  comes  the  outburst  of  this  enfeebled  character, 
half  conscious  of  its  possibility  of  madness,  for  the  joy 
of  love — one  of  the  finer  passionate  things  of  Tennyson  : 

0  let  the  solid  ground 
Not  fail  beneath  my  feet 

Before  my  life  has  found 

What  some  have  found  so  sweet ; 
Then  let  come  what  come  may, 
What  matter  if  I  go  mad, 

1  shall  have  had  my  day. 

He  meets  Maud  in  the  woodland  places,  and  begms 
to  hope,  and  at  night  he  wanders  round  her  house.  And 
here  Tennyson  calls  up  again  the  special  note  in  this 
lover's  nature,  the  nervous  thrill  which  passes  into  pre- 
sentiment of  evil  even  in  the  moment  of  his  joyous  hope, 
and  which  is  awakened  by  so  slight  a  thing  as  all  the 
curtains  of  the  house  being  drawn  close.  He  hears  no 
sound  where  he  stands  but  the  rivulet  running  and  the 
dash  of  the  waves,  but  he  looks  and  sees  all  round  the 
house 


246  Tennyson 

The  death-white  curtain  drawn  ; 

Felt  a  horror  over  me  creep, 

Prickle  my  skin  and  catch  my  breath, 

Knew  that  the  death-white  curtain  meant  but  sleep, 

Yet  I  shudder'd  and  thought  like  a  fool  of  the  sleep  of  death. 

The  same  half-physical,  half-imaginative  horror  comes 
on  him  in  the  very  height  of  his  delight,  when  Maud  has 
promised  to  love  him.  All  the  beginning  of  the  splendid 
ode  of  joy  he  sings  to  his  heart  is  full  of  love's  loveliest 
rapture  : 

I  have  led  her  home,  my  love,  my  only  friend. 

It  continues  rapturous  to  almost  the  close.  But  mortal 
affairs  never  stand  for  long  on  the  topmost  peak.  And 
this  man  was  sure  to  tremble  into  a  suggestion  of  misery 
when  he  was  most  victorious  in  delight.  "  Beat,  happy 
stars,"  he  cries,  "  timing  with  things  below. 

Beat  with  my  heart  more  blest  than  heart  can  tell, 
Blest,  but  for  some  dark  undercurrent  woe 
That  seems  to  draw — but  it  shall  not  be  so  : 
Let  all  be  well,  be  well." 

Another  element  comes  into  the  poem  when  Maud's 
brother  arrives.  The  lover  hates  him.  Is  he  not  the 
son  of  the  man  who  cheated  and  ruined  his  father  ?  Yet 
Maud  loves  her  brother,  and  Maud  has  loved  himself. 
Shall  he  not  then  cease  to  hate?  Shall  he  not  forgive? 
May  he  never  forget,  in  his  hatred  of  the  brother,  all  he 
owes  to  the  sister  !  Yes,  may  God  make  him  then  more 
wretched  even  than  he  has  been.     And  he  feels  hvsteri- 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         247 

cally  happy  that  he  is  free  from  hate,  when,  in  reality, 
it  only  needs  a  touch  to  bring  the  hatred  to  the  surface 
and  to  make  him  forget  everything  in  the  moment, 
except  the  moment.  He  has  no  strength,  no  steadiness, 
no  self-control.  All  this  is  careful  preparation  for  the 
catastrophe,  and  for  the  madness  that  follows  it.  The 
inevitableness  of  the  end  is  seen  in  the  character.  And 
it  is  fine  intellectual  work,  an  excellence  in  this  poem 
which  is  too  much  forgotten  in  the  admiration  we  give 
to  its  beautiful  love-passages — an  excellence  which  is 
even  greater  in  the  descriptions  of  the  lover's  madness 
in  the  second  part  of  the  poem. 

At  last,  these  two  meet  in  the  garden,  and  while  he 
waits,  he  sings  that  lovely  song  which  all  the  world 
knows,  and  on  which  I  need  not  dwell,  but  in  which, 
through  all  its  eager  emotion,  the  poet  does  not  lose  his 
intellectual  self-control,  nor  his  steady  directing  of  his 
subject.  He  prepares,  at  its  very  close,  for  one  of  the 
most  forcible  motives  which  he  uses  regarding  the  lover's 
madness  in  the  second  part — the  motive  of  the  living 
man  believing  that  he  is  dead  and  that  Maud,  were  she 
to  come,  would  make  him  rise  again.  Here  is  this  pre- 
paring passage,  a  leitmotif  for  the  next  part,  the  melody 
of  which  Wagner  would  introduce  again  and  again  in 
the  second  part  : 

She  is  coining,  my  own,  my  sweet ; 

Were  it  ever  so  airy  a  tread, 
My  heart  would  hear  her  and  beat. 

Were  it  earth  in  an  earthy  bed  ; 


248  Tennyson 

My  dust  would  hear  her  and  beat. 
Had  I  lain  for  a  century  dead  ; 
Would  start  and  tremble  under  her  feet, 
And  blossom  in  purple  and  red. 

She  comes  ;  the  brother  finds  them  together ;  in  rage  he 
strikes  Maud's  lover,  answering  a  fierce  outbreak  of 
wrath.  But  even  before  his  sweetheart  this  lover  has  no 
power  over  himself,  and  he  strikes  again.  The  duel 
follows  ;  the  brother  is  slain,  and  Maud  sees  the  slaugh- 
ter. On  the  top  of  rapturous  love  comes  bloody  tragedy. 
The  second  part  follows.  The  lover  has  fled,  Maud's 
wild  cry  in  his  ears,  and  a  ghostly  image  of  her  haunting 
his  steps.  His  brain  is  for  a  time  on  the  verge  of  mad- 
ness, and  Tennyson  pictures  this  tottering  condition 
along  with  love's  pathetic  agony.  Then  a  time  of  real 
madness  supervenes,  and  this  also  the  poet  strives  to 
paint  as  it  would  be  in  the  character  he  has  drawn. 
Both  these  states  of  mind  and  emotion  are  wrought  with 
the  most  careful  intellectual  consideration.  A  study  of 
the  characteristics  of  madness  and  its  approach  seems  to 
lie  behind  them,  and  to  have  preceded  the  emotional 
representation  of  the  mortal  sorrow  and  love  of  the  hero. 
This  scientific  element  is  a  little  too  prominent,  at  least 
it  is   so  in  Part  v.,  which  begins, 

Dead,  long  dead 
Long  dead  ! 

in  which  the  madness  has  fully   come.     The  mind  of 
a  madman  gambols  from  the  point  in  hand,  and  Tenny 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         249 

son  has  skilfully  wrought  this  out.  But  these  sudden 
changes  do  not  arise,  as  Tennyson  makes  them  arise, 
from  a  thought  or  a  memory  suggested  by  what  the 
madman  is  saying  to  himself,  so  much  as  from  some 
physical  change  in  himself,  or  from  some  suggestion 
to  his  senses  from  the  world  without.  Here  his  mad- 
ness is  set  off  on  a  new  path  by  the  words  he  hears 
himself  using.  He  runs  away  on  the  new  images  they 
suggest  to  him.  And  as  this  is  the  case,  the  whole  of 
this  Part  v.  falls  almost  into  a  logical  order,  as  if  at  the 
bottom  of  his  madness  the  man  was  not  mad  at  all. 
We  can  trace,  then,  the  elaborate  argumentative  way  in 
which  Tennyson  has  worked  it  out — a  thing  we  cannot 
do,  for  example,  in  the  madness  of  Ophelia — a  similar 
madness  of  love  and  sorrow  and  death.  The  picture 
is  also  carefully  made  up  of  scattered  impressions 
recorded  in  the  first  part  of  the  poem.  These  are 
apparently  huddled  together  in  the  disorder  of  madness, 
but  it  is  not  really  so.  They  have  a  connection,  and  the 
stitches  which  unite  them  are  too  clear.  The  inter- 
spersed reflections  are  also  too  sane — as,  for  instance, 

Friend,  to  be  struck  by  the  public  foe, 
Then  to  strike  him  and  lay  him  low, 
That  were  a  public  merit,  far, 
Whatever  the  Quaker  holds,  from  sin  ; 
But  the  red  life  spilt  for  a  private  blow— 
I  swear  to  you,  lawful  and  lawless  war 
Are  scarcely  even  akin. 

A  madman  might  think  a  part  of  it,  but  not  the  whole, 
and  not  in  that  way. 


250  Tennyson 

Even  in  two  previous  divisions  (ii.  and  iv.)  reflections 
are  introduced  which  are  too  exclusively  of  the  intellect. 
They  lower  the  emotional  note  by  their  intrusion.  The 
verse  in  division  ii. — 

Strange,  that  the  mind,  when  fraught 

With  a  passion  so  intense 

One  would  think  that  it  well 

Might  drown  all  life  in  the  eye — 

That  it  should,  by  being  so  overwrought. 

Suddenly  strike  on  a  sharper  sense 

For  a  shell,  a  flower,  little  things 

Which  else  would  have  been  past  by  ! 

And  now,  I  remember,  I, 

When  he  lay  dying  there, 

I  noticed  one  of  his  many  rings 

(For  he  had  many,  poor  worm)  and  thought 

It  is  his  mother's  hair — 

IS  out  of  tune  with  the  rest  of  this  lovely  and  pathetic 
poem.  I  wish  also  that  the  physiological  reflection  in 
verse  8  of  division  iv.  were  out  of  the  poem  : 

'T  is  the  blot  upon  the  brain 
That  7vi//  show  itself  without. 

Every  now  and  then  the  science  Tennyson  chose  to 
meddle  with  enters  into  his  art  in  this  distressful  way. 

With  these  slight  exceptions,  the  divisions  ii.,  iii.,  and 
iv.,  in  which  the  approach  of  madness  is  drawn,  are  of 
extraordinary  loveliness.  They  do  not  sound  the  deep- 
sea  depths  of  sorrow,  remorse,  and  love,  but  they  are  of 
an  exquisite  and  pathetic  gentleness,  and  their  grief  and 
love  are  as  profound    as  the  character    Tennyson  has 


"Maud"  and  the  War-Poems         251 

drawn  was  capable  of  feeling.  In  iv.  he  rises  with  that 
lonely  cry  at  the  beginning, 

O  that  't  were  possible 

After  long  grief  and  pain 

To  find  the  arms  of  my  true  love 

Round  me  once  again, 

into  perhaps  the  tenderest  music  of  sorrow  in  all  his 
poetry,  half  of  sweet  memories  of  the  past,  half  of 
broken  misery  in  the  present,  and  with  one  touch  of 
hope  for  the  future  made  out  of  the  image  of  his  love  in 
heaven.  If  only  he  had  left  out  these  lines  in  the  last 
verse, 

And  I  loathe  the  square  and  streets, 
And  the  faces  that  one  meets, 
Hearts  with  no  love  for  me, 

the  end  would  be  as  perfect  as  the  beginning. 

Part  iii.  is  the  resurrection  of  the  lover,  and  is  dedi- 
cated to  war  as  the  redeeming  power.  The  first  verse  is 
beautiful,  but  it  is  strange  for  a  soul  in  the  peace  of 
heaven  to  place  a  new  hope  for  the  world  in  the  Crimean 
war  ;  nor  do  the  fine  passages  and  river-rolling  metre  of 
the  rest  of  the  poem  excuse,  in  my  opinion,  the  advo- 
cacy of  war,  by  means  of  art,  as  the  saviour  from 
national  sin. 

In  conclusion,  there  are  yet  two  things  to  say.  The  first 
regards  the  intellectual  power  revealed  in  the  first  and 
second  parts  of  the  poem,  in  due  subordination  to  the 
rule  of  passionate  imagination.    There  is  no  view  so  mis- 


252  Tennyson 

taken  as  the  common  view,  that  poets,  because  they  deal 
chiefly  with  the  emotions,  are  for  that  very  reason  less 
intellectual  than  men  whose  work  lies  in  science,  phi- 
losophy, logic,  or  law.  On  the  contrary,  it  is  in  the 
sphere  of  the  highest  and  deepest  emotions,  when  they 
are  so  controlled  by  the  artist's  will  towards  the  perfect 
representation  of  his  idea  as  not  to  flame  in  violent  rush 
but  to  burn  with  a  steady  core  of  white  fire,  that  the 
loftiest  efforts  and  successes  of  the  intellect  of  man  are 
made,  and  reach  their  keenest  point  of  expression. 
Every  great  poem,  then — and  no  poem  can  be  great 
without  intensity  of  feeling — is  also  a  treasure-house  of 
the  intellectual  powers,  and  can  be  studied,  like  a  uni- 
verse, from  that  point  of  view.  Maud  is  not  one  of  the 
least  of  these. 

Secondly,  I  have  made  certain  criticisms  on  Aland, 
and  I  am  troubled  by  having  made  them.  To  point  out 
imperfections,  or  what  seem  to  me  imperfections,  in  a 
poem  I  love  so  dearly,  is  like  a  patriot  who  draws  atten- 
tion to  the  imperfections  of  his  country.  But  if  he  love 
her  well  and  honestly,  his  country  is  none  the  worse. 
She  is  so  far  above  him,  and  her  beauty  is  so  clear,  and 
he  is  so  conscious  of  it,  that  no  one,  he  thinks,  will 
imagine  that  he  desires  to  lessen  the  world's  admiration 
of  her.  And  Maud  is  so  beautiful  a  poem  that  the 
small  regrets  of  criticism  are  as  nothing  in  comparison 
with  the  large  delights  its  poetry  gives.  Moreover,  the 
criticisms  may  be  all  wrong.  When  we  approach  a  great 
poet's  work,  our  proper  position  is  humility. 


"  Maud  "  and  the  War-Poems         253 

But  these  criticisms  have  been  all  of  one  kind.  They 
have  objected  to  the  intrusion  of  scientific  analysis  into 
a  work  of  art,  and  to  the  direction  of  it  to  the  support 
of  a  disputable  moral  theory — that  the  nation  and  the 
individual  may  be  set  free  from  selfishness  by  war. 
These  objections  are  stronger  against  Afaud  than  against 
a  different  kind  of  poem,  because  Maud  is,  of  all  Ten- 
nyson's longer  poems,  the  most  distinctly  a  piece  of 
pure  art.  All  the  love  story,  both  in  its  joy  and  sorrow, 
lies  solely  in  the  realm  of  imaginative  and  passionate 
art,  and  its  loveliness  is  there  supreme.  The  jarring 
note  then  which  is  made  by  intellectual  analysis,  and  by 
moral  purpose,  pushed  into  this  sweeter  and  higher 
realm,  is  more  harsh  and  grating  than  it  would  be  in  a 
poem  not  so  divinely  beautiful.  This,  which  is  the  real 
excuse  for  the  criticisms,  is  in  itself  an  additional 
homage  to  those  lovely,  unalloyed  parts  of  the  poem 
which  are  charged  with  personal  emotion  alone. 

It  is  difficult  to  say  anything  in  praise  of  these  parts, 
because  that  which  reaches  a  high  loveliness  is  above 
all  praise.  It  is  loved  of  those  who  can  love  it.  When 
they  are  asked  why  they  love  it,  they  answer,  "  I  love  it 
because  I  love  it,"  and  when  they  are  asked  why  it  is 
good,  they  answer,  "  Because  it  is  good  ;  he  that  hath 
ears  to  hear  let  him  hear."  What  are  we  to  do  with  folk 
who  cannot  hear  the  soft,  wild,  changeful  music  of  verse 
and  of  emotion — repeating  one  another  in  difference, 
each  echo  awakening  a  new  melody  and  beauty  mak- 
ing all  their  atmosphere — of  poems  like 


254 


Tennyson 


A  voice  by  the  cedar  tree, 

or,  still  more  varied  in  interwoven  changes  of  feeling, 
each  change  it  makes  with  its  own  metrical  form — that 
high  canzone  of  enchanted  love — 

I  have  led  her  home,  my  love,  my  only  friend. 

But  why  should  I  say  more  ?  It  is  impossible  to  criti- 
cise these  things,  to  explain  why  they  or  the  Garden 
Song  are  beautiful,  or  why  the  poem  of  the  broken 
heart,  "O  that  'twere  possible,"  reaches  in  simplicity 
those  depths  of  sorrow  where  beauty  sits  in  the  garb  of 
pity  and  subdues  the  soul. 


CHAPTER  X 

IDYLLS   OF    THE   KING 

IN  the  Idylls  of  the  King  Tennyson  has  worked  up 
into  a  whole  the  ancient  story  of  Arthur,  a  story 
which  is  at  least  a  thousand  years  old.  How  it 
first  arose  none  can  tell.  Whether  it  has  any  historical 
basis  it  is  also  impossible  to  decide.  It  is  supposed  that 
there  was  an  historical  Arthur  who  fought  twelve  great 
battles  with  the  English  heathen,  and  who  had  many 
hero-chieftains  under  his  sway  and  in  his  devotion,  but 
the  more  we  look  at  him  the  more  his  figure  recedes  into 
the  mist  of  legend  or  of  myth.  Even  the  country  where 
he  reigned,  and  the  lands  over  which  his  wars  were 
waged,  are  not  known  to  us.  Some  scholars  make  him 
a  warrior  of  Southern  Britain.  Others  place  him  in  the 
North,  beyond  the  Border,  and  he  fights  with  the  Saxon 
chiefs  from  Dumbarton  to  the  eastern  coast,  beating 
them  back  in  twelve  great  battles.  Out  of  the  dim 
vapour  of  ancientry  these  two  great  figures  rise,  and  the 
name  of  Arthur  alone  mingles  them  into  one.  Tennyson 
takes  the  first  tradition,  and  it  is  the  one  that  has  the 
most  prevailed  in  literature. 

255 


256  Tennyson 

It  is  not,  however,  with  an  historical,  but  with  a  myth- 
ical Arthur  that  we  have  to  deal,  and  we  need  not  be 
forced  to  surrender  the  wild  island  of  Tintagil,  the  mystic 
expanse  of  Lyonnesse,  the  rock  of  Glastonbury  rising 
from  its  marshes,  and  the  lovely  meadows  round  Caer- 
leon  upon  Usk.  There  is  our  romantic  country  ;  there 
the  legendary  land  where  Arthur  was  born  ;  there  the 
valley  of  Avalon  where  he  took  refuge  when  wounded  to 
the  death.  There  is  not  one  touch  of  the  real  world  .in 
all  the  scenery  that  Tennyson  invents  in  his  poem.  It 
belongs  throughout  to  that  country  which  eye  hath  not 
seen  nor  ear  heard,  but  which  the  heart  of  man  has  imag- 
ined. It  is  more  than  invented  landscape.  It  often 
breathes  the  atmosphere  of  the  fairy  lands,  and  of  those 
dreams  which  open  the  spaceless  realms  beyond  our 
senses.  It  seems  to  be  born  before  the  sight  and  then 
to  die  and  be  born  in  another  form — changing,  yet  un- 
changed. No  mortal  hands  have  built  the  city  of  Arthur 
and  his  palace.  It  is  no  land  dwelt  in  by  bold  bad  men 
we  see,  when  Arthur  rides  through  the  mountains  and 
finds  the  diamonds  ;  when  Geraint  and  Enid  go  through 
the  green  gloom  of  the  wood  ;  when  Galahad  rides  over 
the  black  swamp,  leaping  from  bridge  to  bridge  till  he 
sail  to  the  spiritual  city  ;  when  Lancelot  drives  through 
the  storm  to  the  enchanted  towers  of  Carbonek  seven 
days  across  the  sea.  Nor  is  the  Nature  actual  Nature, 
but  that  v\'hich  is  seen 

From  magic  casements  opening  on  the  foam 
Of  perilous  seas,  in  fairy  lands  forlorn. 


Idylls  of  the  King  257 

And  when  we  can  disburden  ourselves  of  the  ethics  and 
allegory,  the  personages  are  still  as  dreamlike  as  the 
landscape,  old  as  the  seas  that  roll  over  Lyonnesse,  and 
yet  young  for  ever  in  imagination.  In  our  everyday 
world  the  Arthur  and  Guinevere  of  Romance,  Lancelot 
and  the  Lady  of  the  Lake,  Gawain  and  Galahad,  Perci- 
vale  and  Elaine  are  unreal  shapes  ;  yet  how  real  they 
are  in  a  better  v/orld  !  The  interests  of  the  world  we 
call  real  fade  and  die,  our  children  will  not  care  for 
them  ;  for  half  of  them,  for  those  that  are  not  founded 
on  love,  we  do  not  care  ourselves  ;  but  the  interests  of 
romance  are  eternal.  They  blossom  into  a  new  spring 
year  by  year,  and  we  take  more  thought  for  the  fates  of 
Lancelot  and  Guinevere  than  we  do  for  what  the  Swede 
intends  or  what  the  French.  For  "  fable  is  Love's 
world,"  and  the  great  myths  and  their  figures  are  the 
dear  inhabitants  of  the  heart  of  man.  Centuries  have 
been  stirred  and  thrilled  by  Arthur  and  his  knights. 
England,  France,  Germany,  and  Italy  have  awakened 
into  creation  at  their  Celtic  touch  ;  and  poetry,  painting, 
sculpture,  and  music  have  replied  to  their  enchantment. 
From  Cornwall  or  the  North  the  story  got  to  Wales  ; 
from  Wales  it  fled  to  Brittany.  From  Brittany  it  re- 
turned to  Wales  and  crossed  the  March  into  England 
in  the  Brut  of  Layamon,  the  first  English  poem  of  the 
imagination  after  the  Conquest.  But  before  that  time, 
it  had  got  from  Brittany  into  France,  and  from  France 
in  French  to  England,  where  prose  tales  in  Latin  and 

poems  in  English  and  in  Norman  French  sent  it  far  and 
17 


258  Tennyson 

wide,  Chaucer  owned  its  power  ;  Malory  embodied  it ; 
Spenser  seized  it ;  Milton  thought  of  it  as  an  epic  ; 
Dryden  considered  it  ;  Wordsworth  touched  it ;  Tenny. 
son  took  up  its  lyre  again  ;  Morris  and  Swinburne  and 
Arnold  entered  into  its  enchanted  land.  But  it  was 
characteristic  of  Tennyson's  steadiness  of  temper  and 
fulness  of  thought  that  he  should  try  to  make  his  form 
of  it  complete  and  new-created.  At  first  it  moved  him 
only  as  romance,  and  we  have  seen  how  his  youth 
played  with  it  in  The  Lady  of  Shalott^  in  Sir  Galahad, 
and  in  the  ride  of  Lancelot  and  Guinevere  through 
woods  of  love  and  spring.  Then  in  the  Morte  d' Arthur 
the  story  was  fitted  in  1842  by  certain  modern  touches 
to  modern  life,  yet  these  had  to  be  explained  by  the  pro- 
logue and  epilogue.  In  that  poem  itself  the  tale  was 
chief  ;  it  follows  the  old  romance  and  breathes  its  air. 

In  1842,  when  the  Mortc  d' Arthur  appeared,  Tenny- 
son does  not  seem  to  have  thought  of  making  the  story 
allegorical.  I  do  not  even  think  that  when  the  first  four 
Idylls  were  published — Geraint  and  Enid ;  Merlin  and 
Vivien  ;  Lancelot  and  Elaine  ;  and  Guinevere — Tennyson 
wrote  them  with  a  set  allegorical  intention.  They  are 
only  modernised  by  being  made  a  representation  of  true 
love  and  false  love.  Vivien  the  harlot  is  set  over  against 
the  tender  innocence  of  Elaine.  Enid,  the  true  wife,  is 
opposed  to  Guinevere  who  has  been  untrue.  The  men 
also  represent  different  phases  of  love  as  modern  as  they 
are  ancient.  Geraint  and  Merlin,  Lancelot  and  Arthur, 
have  each  their  distinct  lesson — beyond    the  story — to 


Idylls  of  the  King  259 

modern  life.  They  have  not  yet  become  allegorical,  and 
even  the  lesson,  the  ethical  aim,  is  as  yet  subordinate  to 
the  story.  True  conduct,  as  is  just  in  art,  is  indirectly, 
not  directly  taught. 

But  when  we  come  to  1870 — to  the  volume  which 
began  with  The  Coming  of  Arthiw — the  inner  intention 
of  the  whole  poem  seems  to  be  changed.  The  making 
of  a  kind  of  epic  out  of  the  story  of  Arthur,  which 
should  have  an  instructive  but  indirect  relation  to  the 
moral  needs  of  society  and  the  individual,  is  placed  upon 
the  second  plane.  The  poem  is  now  an  allegory  of  the 
soul  of  man  warring  with  sense,  and  passing  on  its  way 
through  life  to  death,  and  through  death  to  resurrection. 
The  great  rulers  of  the  kingdom  of  human  nature — the 
intellect,  the  conscience,  the  will,  the  imagination,  the 
divine  spirit  in  man — are  shadowed  forth  in  mystic  per- 
sonages. The  historic  powers  which  stand  outside  the 
soul  and  help  it  to  reign  and  work — the  Church,  the 
Law,  the  great  Graces  of  God — are  also  embodied. 
Moreover,  the  various  conditions  of  human  nature  in 
its  growth  from  brutality  to  an  ordered  kingdom,  that 
which  saves  or  loses  true  life,  the  general  desires  and 
tendencies  of  man,  the  temptations  which  beset  him,  the 
wise  and  unwise  views  of  the  goal  of  life,  the  love  which 
saves,  the  love  which  ruins,  the  religious  passion  which 
leads  aright  and  that  which  leads  astray,  are  symbolised 
before  us  in  a  number  of  other  personages,  episodes,  and 
events  invented  by  Tennyson  for  the  sake  of  his  allegory. 

Tlu-  Comifig  of  Arthur   shows   this   conception    fully 


26o  Tennyson 

orbed  in  the  mind  of  Tennyson.  Arthur  is  the  rational 
soul,  not  the  son  of  Uther  and  Ygerne,  but  coming  mys- 
teriously from  heaven  and  washed  into  Merlin's  arms  by 
a  great  wave.  Merlin,  who  educates  him  is  intellectual 
power,  with  all  the  magic  of  science.  Arthur's  kingship 
is  opposed  by  the  brutal  and  sensual  powers  in  human 
nature,  but  the  soul  beats  them  down,  and  lets  in  light 
and  justice  over  the  waste  places  of  human  nature  where 
the  ape,  the  tiger,  and  the  bandit  lurk.  Guinevere  is  the 
heart,  and  all  we  mean  by  the  term.  The  soul,  to  do  its 
work,  must  be  knit  to  the  heart  in  noble  marriage — 
Arthur  must  be  wed  to  Guinevere.  The  Knights  of  the 
Round  Table  are  the  high  faculties  in  man  whom  the 
soul  builds  into  order  round  it,  to  do  its  just  and  re- 
forming will.  When  the  King  is  crowned  and  married 
the  three  great  fairies  that  stand  by  are  Faith,  Hope,  and 
Charity  ;  and  the  Lady  of  the  Lake,  "  clothed  in  white 
samite,  mystic,  wonderful,"  who  gives  the  soul  Excalibur 
— the  sword  of  the  Spirit — with  which  to  do  his  war- 
work  against  base  sense,  appetite,  and  their  disordered 
tyranny,  is  the  Church.  In  embodying  these  concep- 
tions, every  word,  every  adjective,  every  description  is 
weighed  by  Tennyson.  The  symbolism  is  extended  into 
the  remotest  recesses  of  the  tale.  The  allegory  is  thus 
fully  launched  in  The  Coming  of  Arthur,  and  the  Idylls 
that  were  published  with  it,  and  that  followed  it,  were 
written  to  the  allegory.  Even  those  that  preceded  it 
appear  to  have  been  somewhat  modified  to  suit  its 
requirements. 


Idylls  of  the  King  261 

The  question  now  arises,  Of  what  kind  was  this  alle- 
gory of  Tennyson's,  and  how  did  he  manage  it  ?  It 
differed  from  the  allegories  that  preceded  it.  The  great 
mediaeval  allegory.  The  Romance  of  the  Rose  (the  type  of 
all  allegory  in  the  Middle  Ages),  was  nothing  but  an 
allegory.  There  was  no  story  connected  with  it  which 
was  independent  of  the  allegory.  The  series  of  events 
and  adventures  which  brought  the  knight  at  last  to  the 
enjoyment  of  the  Rose  were  allegorically  invented,  and 
each  of  them  had  its  meaning.  The  story  was  obscure 
and  the  allegory  was  plain.  But  in  Tennyson's  poem  the 
story  existed  already  ;  it  was  independent  of  the  allegory, 
and  it  forms  an  important  part  of  the  poem.  Neither 
is  the  allegory  plain  ;  it  is  hidden  beneath  the  story. 

Our  next  great  allegory  is  The  Faerie  Queene.  That  is 
also  plainly  allegorical.  The  names  make  the  meaning 
clear.  The  Red  Cross  Knight,  Una,  Duessa,  Orgoglio, 
the  Dragon,  all  tell  their  tale.  But  there  is  much  more 
of  a  story  in  this  first  book  of  The  Faerie  Queene  (and  I 
speak  of  the  first  book  alone,  for  it  is  the  only  one  which 
has  a  clear  unity)  than  there  is  in  The  Romance  of  the 
Rose.  We  are  nearly  as  much  interested  in  the  knight, 
in  Una,  and  in  many  of  the  minor  characters,  as  we 
might  be  if  they  were  real  personages,  and  not  images 
of  truth  and  purity,  of  pride  and  falsehood  and  hypoc- 
risy. But  in  Tennyson's  poem  the  story  is  often  greater 
than  the  allegory  ;  it  still  breathes,  and  moves,  and  in- 
terests those  to  whom  allegory  is  a  weariness.  At  other 
times  the  story  is  of  equal  weight  with  the  allegory,  and 


262  Tennyson 

we  can  ignore  the  allegory  if  it  please  us  to  do  so.  This 
separates  altogether  the  Idylls  of  the  King  from  The 
Faerie  Queene.  Moreover,  the  names  are  not  allegorical. 
We  have  to  search  for  a  hidden,  not  to  follow  a  plain 
allegory.  Spenser  invented  a  story  to  suit  his  concep- 
tion ;  Tennyson  took  an  old  tale  and  inserted  his  con- 
ception into  it.  But  he  was  forced  by  his  allegorical 
end  to  frequently  invent  as  well,  and  his  inventions, 
though  they  are  often  of  the  finest  quality  (as  in  The 
Holy  Grail),  confuse  our  interest  in  the  story  as  much 
as  the  story  confuses  their  meaning.  The  allegory  and 
the  tale  do  not  fit  throughout.  They  clash  and  trouble 
one  another.  An  allegory,  to  be  right  in  art,  ought  to 
have  a  story  entirely  invented  for  its  purpose. 

The  next  great  allegory  with  which  we  may  compare 
that  of  Tennyson  is  the  first  book  of  The  Pilgrim's 
Progress,  This  is  the  finest  allegory  in  the  English 
language — the  ideal  art-thing.  It  proclaims  itself  an 
allegory  by  the  names.  The  city  of  Vanity  Fair,  the 
Delectable  Mountains,  tell  what  they  are  ;  and  yet  these 
places  seem  as  real  as  London  and  the  Surrey  hills. 
Christian  and  Pliable,  Faithful  and  the  Old  Adam, 
Wanton  and  Mr.  Worldly  Wiseman,  Great-Heart  and 
Giant  Despair,  tell  also  who  and  what  they  are  ;  and 
yet  they  are  all  alive,  they  talk  like  living  beings  ;  we 
have  met  them  in  life — yesterday  in  the  streets  ;  they 
awaken  the  keenest  human  interest. 

It  is  this  combination  of  reality  and  allegory,  of  story 
and  symbol,  each  of  them  clear,  vivid,  and  human,  and 


Idylls  of  the  King  263 

both  going  straight  home  to  the  experiences  of  the  soul, 
which  lifts  The  Pilgrim's  Progress  into  the  highest  place. 
The  story  and  the  allegory  are  of  almost  equal  weight 
in  the  imagination.  The  inherent  fault  of  an  allegory — 
want  of  human  interest — has  been  overcome  without 
any  loss  of  the  allegorical  interest.  This  is  a  real 
triumph.  Nobody  else  but  Dante  has  done  it,  and  his 
way  was  only  partly  allegorical.  Tennyson  has  not 
done  it.  His  poem  is  not  plainly  an  allegory,  nor  is  it 
plainly  a  story.  Sometimes  the  men  and  the  women  are 
real,  sometimes  they  are  mere  shadows.  Sometimes  the 
events  are  human  and  romantic,  sometimes  they  are 
metaphysical,  theological  ideas  in  a  romantic  dress. 
We  glide  from  reality  to  vision  and  from  vision  to  real- 
ity. The  two  things  are  not  amalgamated.  In  fact, 
the  allegory  might  as  well  have  been  left  out  altogether, 
and  this  statement,  if  it  be  true,  condemns  the  allegory 
in  the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Nevertheless,  there  is  some- 
thing more  to  be  said.  Bunyan  reached  his  perfection 
of  work  in  this  kind  of  literature  by  natural  naivete'^  by 
the  unconsciousness  and  the  faith  of  a  childlike  imagina- 
tion. Tennyson  reached  what  excellence  he  did  reach 
in  this  matter  by  sheer  dint  of  intellect.  Few  things 
have  given  me  so  high  an  idea  of  Tennyson's  intellectual 
power  as  separate  from  his  imagination,  as  his  fitting  in 
of  the  allegorical  conceptions  into  the  body  of  the  story. 
He  does  not  succeed  in  doing  it  well,  because  it  was  not 
in  art  to  do  it  well  ;  but  the  efforts  his  intellect  makes 
to  do   it,  and  the  comparative  success  he  attained,  are 


264  Tennyson 

proof  of  great  intellectual  power.       They  are   failures, 
but  they  are  gigantic  struggles  for  success. 

It  is  almost  a  pity  that  he  made  these  efforts  at  all. 
They  confuse  his  ethical  ends,  and  they  were  not  needed 
to  attain  those  ends.  All  he  wanted  to  teach  he  could 
have  taught  and  does  teach  through  the  acts  of  the  men 
and  women  of  the  story.  The  repentance  of  Guinevere 
and  the  forgiveness  of  Arthur  are  far  more  impressive, 
and  far  simpler  in  their  lesson  to  life,  when  we  see  Ar- 
thur as  Arthur,  and  Guinevere  as  Guinevere,  than  when 
we  see  Arthur  as  the  rational  soul,  and  Guinevere  as  the 
heart,  in  human  nature.  Moreover,  they  are  not  only 
needless  and  confusing  efforts,  they  are  also  not  good  art. 
They  are  apart  from  the  true  realm  of  poetry.  We  are 
conscious  that  in  working  them  out  and  weaving  them  in, 
elaborate  thinking  has  taken  the  place  of  creative  emo- 
tion; that  art  has  partly  abdicated  her  throne  to  the  under- 
standing. Whenever  the  allegory  is  mingled  up  with  the 
story,  the  poetry  is  disturbed,  the  tale  is  weak,  and  we 
are  a  little  wearied.  This  is  not  the  case  when  the  story 
is  all  allegorical,  when  it  is  invented  by  Tennyson  for 
the  allegory,  as  in  The  Holy  Grail.  Then  there  is  no 
confusion,  and  the  poem  is  in  the  highest  degree  poetic. 
What  I  say  applies  to  the  mixed  poems,  like  Merlin  and 
Vivien.  Moreover,  the  artist's  childlike  pleasure  in  the 
tale,  and  his  sympathy  with  its  passionate  elements,  are 
replaced  (when  the  allegory  is  too  obviously  intruded) 
by  a  want  of  naturalness,  even  by  a  kind  of  pride  in 
cleverness,  which   that  parvenu,  the  analysing   intellect, 


Idylls  of  the  King  265 

always  bring  into  poetry.  I  sometimes  seem  to  detect 
that  Tennyson  really  loved  the  work  his  intellect  did  on 
the  allegory  more  than  the  work  his  imagination  did 
upon  the  story  ;  that  he  loved  the  meanings  he  inserted 
into  the  tale  more  than  the  noble  tale  itself.  This  was 
a  great  mistake  on  his  part,  a  mistake  that  artists  make 
when  they  are  seduced  by  the  understanding.  No  one, 
a  hundred  years  hence,  will  care  a  straw  about  the  alle- 
gory ;  but  men  will  always  care  for  the  story,  and  how 
the  poet  has  made  the  persons  in  it  set  forth  their  human 
nature  on  the  stage  of  life.  The  humanity,  not  the 
metaphysics,  is  the  interesting  thing,  and  Malory's  book, 
though  Tennyson  decries  its  morality,  is  more  human 
more  moral,  than  the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Even  the  far- 
off  mythic  Arthur  is  more  at  home  with  us  than  the 
Arthur  of  the  Idylls  whenever  we  are  forced  to  consider 
him  as  the  rational  soul. 

Tennyson  was  led  away  from  this  simple  human  posi- 
tion, yet  he  loved  his  mistake.  "  Accept,"  he  writes  to 
the  Queen,  "  accept  this  old  imperfect  tale  "  : 

New-old,  and  shadowing  Sense  at  war  with  Soul 
Rather  than  that  gray  king,  whose  name,  a  ghost, 
Streams  like  a  cloud,  man-shaped,  from  mountain  peak. 
And  cleaves  to  cairn  and  cromlech  still  ;  or  him 
Of  Geoffrey's  book,  or  him  of  Malleor's,  one 
Touch'd  by  the  adulterous  finger  of  a  time 
That  hover'd  between  war  and  wantonness, 
And  crownings  and  dethronements. 

This  is  to  like  his  allegory  better  than  the  story,  the 
work  of  his   intellect    more  than  the  work    of  ancient 


266  Tennyson 

imagination  ;  and  there  are  a  good  number  of  persons 
who  will  thank  Tennyson  for  this  kind  of  thing.  They 
will  be  happy  to  find  out  all  about  the  allegory,  and 
when  they  have  found  it  out,  and  labelled  all  the  char- 
acters and  explained  the  metaphysical  relations  of  these 
shadows,  will  persuade  themselves  that  they  are  enjoying 
poetry.  It  is,  however,  an  enjoyment  of  the  understand- 
ing, not  one  of  the  imagination,  a  pleasure  in  analysis, 
not  in  beauty.  Let  them  have  their  way  ;  they  have 
their  reward.  But  our  reward  will  be  to  be  able  to  leave, 
as  much  as  possible,  the  allegory  alone,  and  to  be  happy 
with  that  which  is  passionate,  sensuous,  human,  simple 
and  lovely  in  the  poem,  and  in  the  ravishment  the  imagi- 
nation has  in  the  seeing  of  these  things. 

There  is  plenty  of  opportunity  for  such  work,  in  spite 
of  the  allegory,  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King.  The  romance 
of  the  story  has  caught  hold  of  the  imagination  of  Ten- 
nyson, and  in  his  treatment  of  it  he  has  made  many 
fresh  and  delightful  inventions — not  allegorical,  but 
romantic.  He  has  had  great  pleasure  in  opening  out 
and  developing  the  ancient  characters,  in  clothing  them 
with  new  dresses  of  thought,  in  fitting  new  emotions  to 
the  old  events  in  which  they  play  their  parts.  He  has 
re-created  some  characters  altogether :  and  even  the 
leading  personages  are  frequently  quite  independent  of 
his  allegory.  He  has  built  up  around  his  people  the 
image  of  a  whole  country,  with  its  woods  and  streams, 
hills  and  moors,  marsh  and  desert,  dark  oceans  rolling  in 
on  iron  coasts,  vast  wastes,  ancient  records  of  a  bygone 


Idylls  of  the  King  267 

world  ;  hamlets  and  towns  and  wonderful  cities,  halls  and 
great  palace-courts  with  all  their  varied  architecture  ; 
storms,  and  sunshine,  all  kinds  of  weather,  Nature  in  her 
moods  of  beauty  and  brightness,  of  gloom  and  horror. 
And  over  them  he  has  shed  a  light  from  the  ancient 
time,  a  romantic  air  and  sky.  These  things  belong  to 
art. 

Moreover,  within  the  realm  of  art  much  might  be 
said  of  the  technic  of  the  verse.  The  poem  belongs — 
though  its  composition  stretched  over  so  many  years — 
to  the  central  period  of  the  blank  verse  of  Tennyson, 
before  he  had  wrought  out  (not  to  his  or  our  advantage) 
a  new  kind  of  blank  verse  for  his  dramas,  the  habitude 
of  which  stole  into  the  blank  verse  of  his  old-age, 
and  made  it  in  undramatic  poems  less  musical,  less 
delightful,  even  less  skilful  than  it  was  of  old.  But 
here,  through  this  long  series  of  poems,  the  blank  verse 
is  of  almost  equal  excellence  throughout.  It  is,  as  a 
vehicle  of  thought  and  emotion,  entirely  at  the  poet's 
command.  He  can  make  it  do  exactly  what  he  likes. 
It  has,  at  his  choice,  ease  and  rapidity,  or  slow  and 
stately  movement,  or  it  echoes  in  its  sound  the  thought, 
the  scene,  or  the  thing.  It  is  by  turns  loud  or  low,  soft 
or  rough  in  spirit,  fluid  or  rigid,  abrupt,  delayed,  smooth, 
continuous,  weighty  and  light.  There  are  also  none  of 
the  changes,  tricks  and  placing  of  caesura  or  accent 
which  all  the  artists  of  the  past  in  blank  verse  and 
especially  Milton  have  used,  with  which  Tennyson  is 
not    acquainted,  and    which    he   does  not  himself  use 


268  Tennyson 

with  as  much  science  as  art.  Yet  the  result  is  all 
his  own.  His  blank  verse  stands  apart,  original, 
growing  out  of  his  own  character  and  temper,  and  fre- 
(piently  modified  and  specialised  by  the  special  char- 
acters whom  he  is  describing,  and  by  the  special  forms 
of  natural  scenery  which  he  paints.  Lastly,  it  is  extra- 
ordinarily concise — almost  too  concise.  It  sometimes 
becomes  bald  ;  its  "tricks"  are  sometimes  too  plain  and 
too  often  repeated  ;  it  often  wants  a  rushing  movement, 
and  it  is  always  a  little  too  academic.  We  are  too  con- 
scious of  its  skill,  of  the  infinite  care  spent  on  it,  of  a 
certain  want  of  naturalness  ;  that  is,  it  has  the  defects 
of  its  qualities.  But  we  forget  these  defects  when 
it  is  at  its  best.  Then  indeed  it  is  extraordinarily 
noble,  rolling  like  a  full-fed  river  through  the  country 
of  imagination.  Such  is  it  in  The  Holy  Grail,  in  Guine- 
vere, in  The  Passing  of  Arthur. 

The_Co7ning  of  Arthur,  the  first  of  these  Idylls,  is 
Tennyson's  prologue  to  them  all.  The  allegory  and  the 
story  are  both  mingled  in  it — but  in  this  poem  the  alle 
gory  is  more  prominent  than  the  story.  In  this  Induc- 
tion, Tennyson,  having  now  determined  on  an  allegory, 
is  forced  to  place  its  main  lines  before  his  readers. 

The  Idyll  opens  with  the  waste  and  harried  kingdom 
of  Leodogran,  beast-ridden,  heathen-ridden,  and  the 
weak  king  hiding  with  his  daughter  Guinevere  in  his 
castle.  Then  Leodogran  calls  on  Arthur  for  help,  and 
Arthur,  riding  by  the  castle,  sees  Guinevere,  and  loves 


Idylls  of  the  King  269 

her  for  his  life  ;  and  having  set  her  father  free  from  foes, 
asks  in  reward  her  hand.  So  stand  forth  the  two, 
Arthur  and  Guinevere,  who  are  to  grow  more  and  more 
apart  as  life  moves  on  ;  who,  meeting  in  high  youth  and 
joy,  are  to  meet  for  the  last  time  in  deep  repentance  and 
forgiveness  on  the  banks  of  the  river  of  Death — a  whole 
world  of  failure  and  sin  and  the  ruin  of  great  hopes 
behind  them  :  a  common  tragedy  !  Tennyson  hews  out 
these  figures  with  a  rough,  animating  chisel  in  this  first 
poem.  In  the  poems  that  follow  they  are  finished.  But 
he  does  all  that  is  needed  now,  and  does  it  well.  Guine- 
vere is  but  slightly  touched,  but  Arthur's  character  is, 
as  is  fitting,  more  elaborately  treated. 

He  is  to  be  the  ideal  king — the  ruler  of  men  ;  the 
bringer  of  law  and  peace  and  good  government  into  his 
world,  the  redeemer  of  waste  places  and  wasted  lives,  the 
knitter  together  into  one  compact  body  of  his  knights 
for  purity  of  life  and  overthrowing  of  wrong. 

But  he  is  to  be  more  than  king  :  he  is  to  be  the  ideal 
man  ;  and  for  that  he  must  love.  Love  then  is  born 
in  him,  but  it  is  put  into  connection  with  his  kingly 
work.  No  work  without  love,  but  no  continuance  of 
love  without  work  ;  equal  love  of  woman  and  work,  but 
neither  the  woman  nor  the  man  made  more  than  the 
work.     "  But  were  I  joined  with  her,"  cries  Arthur, 

"  Then  might  we  live  together  as  one  life, 
And  reigning  with  one  will  in  everything 
Have  power  on  this  dark  land  to  lighten  it. 
And  power  on  this  dead  world  to  make  it  live." 


270  Tennyson 

This  is  the  ideal  of  marriage  laid  down  in  The  Princess, 
\    and  consistently  supported  through  all  the  Idylls  of  the 
King  ;  and  herein  is  the  emotional  side  of  Arthur. 

But  his  spiritual  side  is  also  sketched.  He  has  dim 
dreams  and  visions,  like  the  prince  in  The  Princess, 
during  which  the  outward  world  fades  away.  Strange 
and  mystic  powers  from  the  unseen  world  stand  round 
about  him.  He  moves  in  God  and  in  eternity  while 
yet  on  earth  ;  and  in  these  hours  all  phenomena  are  mist 
and  dream.  The  mighty  warrior  on  whom  it  seems  to 
his  knights  the  fire  of  God  descends  in  battle  ;  the  great 
ruler  who  is  to  the  world's  work  as  the  glove  is  to  the 
hand,  cries  in  the  spiritual  hour  when  this  solid  earth  is 
as  a  vapour,  and  in  words  worthy  of  a  great  poet — 

O  ye  stars  that  shudder  over  me, 
O  earth  that  soundest  hollow  under  me 
Vext  with  waste  dreams  ! 

Then  the  allegorical  side  of  him  is  sketched.  His 
senses  are  so  exalted  that  he  sees  the  morning  star 
at  noonday  ;  he  comes  from  the  great  deep  and  goes  to 
it  again  ;  he  is  made  king  by  immortal  queens  ;  he  is 
not  doomed  to  death  but  to  return  and  live  again.  The 
sword  he  wields  blinds  the  eyes  of  men  ;  the  city  he 
lives  in  and  the  great  hall  of  his  knights  is  built  by  the 
intellectual  and  spiritual  powers. 

Half,  then,  of  this  world,  half  of  the  mysterious 
world  beyond,  Arthur  has  the  qualities  of  both,  and 
does   his  work  in   both  with  equal   steadiness  and   fire. 


Idylls  of  the  King  271 

As  such,  he  smites  his  own  spirit  into  those  who  love 
him,  so  that,  when  his  knights  swear  allegiance,  into 
every  face  there  comes 

A  momentary  likeness  of  the  king. 

So  carefully,  and  with  such  foresight  for  the  rest  of  the 
poem,  is  Arthur  hewn  out  before  us  by  the  poet. 

But  another  personage  needs  also  to  be  introduced  : 
Lancelot,  friend  of  the  King,  yet  the  lover  of  the 
Queen.  He  first  appears  with  Arthur  in  the  battle  for 
Arthur's  rights  with  the  rebellious  kings.  They  each 
save  one  another's  life,  and  they  swear  on  the  stricken 
field  a  deathless  love  : 

And  Arthur  said  :  "  Man's  word  is  God  in  man  ; 
Let  chance  what  will,  I  trust  thee  to  the  death." 

Alas  !  in  the  trust,  and  in  the  friendship,  lies  hidden 
all  the  tragic  fate  to  come  ;  and  when  we  hear  that 
Lancelot  is  sent  by  Arthur  to  fetch  Guinevere,  we  know 
that  the  joy,  splendour,  and  hopes  of  the  King  are  already 
doomed.  The  rift  is  in  the  lute  which  will  make  all  the 
music  dumb.  What  faith  has  bound  together,  unfaith 
unbinds.  O  tragic  world  and  tragic  life  of  man  !  Ten- 
nyson has  lifted  to  the  highest  peak  in  this  poem  the  early 
inspiration  of  the  King  and  his  people,  that  our  pity  may 
be  wrought  to  fulness  by  the  catastrophe.  Only  a  hint 
here  and  there  suggests  the  pain  to  come,  but  the  hints 
are  clear.  There  is  admirable  skill  shown  in  the  manage- 
ment of  this. 


272  Tennyson 

Thus  the  characters  are  placed  in  preparation  for  the 
whole.  The  story,  as  story,  is  set  afloat  by  the  ques- 
tions of  Guinevere's  father  concerning  Arthur's  birth. 
Is  he  a  lawful  king  or  not  ?  Arthur's  knights  tell 
Leodogran  the  old  legend  of  Uther  and  Ygerne  and 
the  siege  of  Tintagil.  Thus  Tennyson  keeps  touch 
with  the  tale  which  is  his  basis  ;  but  after  that,  for  the 
sake  of  his  allegory,  he  invents,  and  Bellicent  tells  the 
story  of  Arthur's  coronation,  and  the  mighty  oath  by 
which  the  soul  binds  all  the  powers  of  man  to  follow 
him  in  purity  to  redress  the  wrongs  of  the  world.  In 
the  midst  there  arises  that  fine  vision  of  the  Church  as 
the  Lady  of  the  Lake — a  splendid  picture,  in  which 
every  word  is  a  symbol  : 

A  mist 
Of  incense  curl'd  about  her,  and  her  face 
Well-nigh  was  hidden  in  the  minster  gloom  ; 
But  there  was  heard  among  the  holy  hymns 
A  voice  as  of  the  waters,  for  she  dwells 
Down  in  a  deep  ;  calm,  whatsoever  storms 
May  shake  the  world,  and  when  the  surface  rolls, 
Hath  power  to  walk  the  waters  like  our  Lord. 

Then,  to  restore  the  humanity  of  the  tale,  Arthur's 
youth  with  his  half-sister,  Bellicent,  is  pictured — one  of 
Tennyson's  homely  pictures  of  domestic  tenderness  ; 
and  then,  lifting  himself  easily  into  more  exalted 
thought,  he  invents  the  magic  story  which  signifies  the 
coming  of  the  soul  into  this  world  from  the  high  heaven 
and  out  of  the  great  deep.  The  allegory  may  be  let  go, 
but  the   description   of    Merlin  and  Bleys,  descending 


Idylls  of  the  King  273 

while  Uther  is  dying  to  the  cove  below  Tintagil  Castle, 
is  a  piece  of  noble  poetry — half  nature  and  half  legend  : 

And  then  the  two 
Dropt  to  the  cove  and  watch'd  the  great  sea  fall, 
Wave  after  wave,  each  mightier  than  the  last, 
Till  last,  a  ninth  one,  gathering  half  the  deep 
And  full  of  voices,  slowly  rose  and  plunged 
Roaring,  and  all  the  wave  was  in  a  flame  : 
And  down  the  wave  and  in  the  flame  was  borne 
A  naked  babe,  and  rode  to  Merlin's  feet, 
Who  stoopt  and  caught  the  babe,  and  cried  "  The  King 
Here  is  an  heir  for  Uther  ! "     And  the  fringe 
Of  that  great  breaker,  sweeping  up  the  strand, 
Lash'd  at  the  wizard  as  he  spake  the  word, 
And  all  at  once  all  round  him  rose  in  fire. 
So  that  the  child  and  he  were  clothed  in  fire. 
And  presently  thereafter  follow'd  calm, 
Free  sky  and  stars. 

Scarcely  less  fine  than  this  is  the  dream  of  Leodogran, 

and  the  description  of  the  great  church  in  the  Maytime, 

and    the    stainless    knights    in    white     robes,   upon    the 

wedding  morn — with  the  one  torch,  in  w'hich  so  much  of 

tragedy  is  held,  of  the  drooped  eyelids  of  Guinevere,  in 

whose  heart  lay  Lancelot  while  her  hand  was  clasped  in 

Arthur's.     Lastly,  as  a  piece  of  glorious  literature,  there 

is  the  marriage  and  coronation  song  of  the  knights.     It 

was  not  in  the  first  draft  of   The  Comhig  of  Arthur.     It 

embodies   the    thought   of   the   poem,  grips    the  whole 

meaning  of  it  together.     And  its  sound  is  the  sound  of 

martial  triumph,  of  victorious  weapons  in  battle,  and  of 

knights  in  arms.     We  hear  in  the  carefully  varied  chorus, 

in  the  very  rattle  and  shattering  of  the  vowels  in  the 
18 


2  74  Tennyson 

words,  the  beating  of  axe  on  helm  and  shaft  on  shield. 
Rugged,  clanging,  clashing  lines — it  is  a  splendid  effort 
of  art.     King  Olaf  might  have  sung  it. 

Blow  trumpet,  for  the  world  is  white  with  May  ; 
Blow  trumpet,  the  long  night  hath  roU'd  away  ! 
Blow  thro'  the  living  world — "  Let  the  King  reign." 

Shall  Rome  or  Heathen  rule  in  Arthur's  realm  ? 
Flash  brand  and  lance,  fall  battle-axe  upon  helm, 
Fall  battle-axe,  and  flash  brand  !     Let  the  King  reign. 


Blow,  for  our  Sun  is  mighty  in  his  May ! 

Blow,  for  our  Sun  is  mightier  day  by  day  I 

Clang  battle-axe,  and  clash  brand  !     Let  the  King  reign. 

The  King  will  follow  Christ,  and  we  the  King 
In  whom  high  God  hath  breathed  a  secret  thing. 
Fall  battle-axe,  and  flash  brand  !     Let  tlie  King  reign. 

We  hear  its  contrast  in  Merlin's  song,  as  soft  and  flow- 
ing as  the  other  was  braying  and  broken,  and  we  think 
with  gratitude  of  the  artist  who  could  do  both  with 
equal  ease.  The  graciousness  of  the  rivulet-music  and 
soft  play  of  Nature  is  in  the  lines  of  this  delicate  song, 
and  the  gaiety  of  youth  ;  and  mingled  with  these  the 
deep  and  favourite  thought  of  Tennyson  of  the  pre- 
existence  of  the  soul.  It  is  pleasant  to  hear  it,  for  W6 
have  companied  with  the  shadow  of  tragedy  : 

Rain,  rain,  and  sun  !  a  rainbow  in  the  sky ! 
A  young  man  will  be  wiser  by  and  by  ; 
An  old  man's  wit  may  wander  ere  he  die. 

\ 


Idylls  of  the   King  275 

Rain,  rain,  and  sun  !  a  rainbow  on  the  lea  ! 
And  truth  is  this  to  me  and  that  to  thee  ; 
And  truth  or  clothed  or  naked  let  it  be. 

Rain,  sun,  and  rain  !  and  the  free  blossom  blows  ; 
Sun,  rain,  and  sun  !  and  where  is  he  who  knows? 
From  the  great  deep  to  the  great  deep  he  goes. 


In  The  Coming  of  Arthur  the  King  is  crowned  and 
married,  and  the  land  subdued  to  peace  and  justice. 
The  heathen  and  the  Romans  are  driven  out  ;  the 
Round  Table  established.  Arthur  sits  on  the  judgment- 
seat,  and  there  is  a  sketch  of  him  in  Gareth  and  Lynette 
doing  this  work.  Knights  ride  away  each  day  from  the 
Court  to  deliver  the  weak  from  the  oppressor  ;  and  the 
young  men  of  noble  birth  in  the  kingdom  whom  Arthur's 
character  has  inspired  come,  like  Gareth,  to  Camelot  to 
join  his  band,  seeking  knighthood  and  high  adventure. 
So  everywhere  the  Order  is  recruited,  the  King's  power 
grows,  and  into  all  the  knights,  young  and  clean  and 
eager,  the  King  pours  his  spirit  : 

Clear  honour  shining  like  the  dewy  star 

Of  dawn,  of  faith  in  their  great  King,  with  pure 

Affection,  and  the  light  of  victory, 

And  glory  gain'd,  and  ever  more  to  gain. 

All  is  well ;  and  the  idyll  of  Gareth  and  Lynette  repre- 
sents this  golden  time.  In  human  affairs,  in  the  history 
of  great  causes,  in  men's  lives,  in  their  love,  there  is  a 
time  of  glad  beginnings,  such  a  beginning  as  Nature  has 
in  spring.     Gareth   is  the  image  of   this  pleasant,  pro- 


276  Tennyson 

phetic  time.  He  is  also  the  image  of  the  Arthurian 
kingdom  in  its  youthful  energy,  purity,  gentleness,  ideal- 
ity ;  he  is  moreover  the  incarnation  of  the  vigour,  cour- 
age, gaiety,  and  audacity  of  youth.  Nothing  seems 
imj)ossible  to  the  King  and  the  Round  Table  ;  nothing 
seems  impossible  to  Gareth.  When  we  are  young,  noth- 
ing seems  impossible  to  us.  "  Madam,"  Youth  says  to 
Mother  Nature,  "  there  is  no  such  thing  as  the  impossi- 
ble." Then  Nature  smiles,  for  she  loves  the  bold  ; 
nevertheless,  she  strikes  hard.  If  we  are  gay  when  we 
are  smitten,  she  is  on  our  side.  We  get  our  way  for  a 
time,  and  do  what  all  the  world  says  cannot  be  done. 
But  if  our  courage  fade  at  her  stroke,  or  we  take  it 
sullenly,  she  frowns  in  scorn  and  tramples  us  beneath 
her  feet. 

Gareth  was  one  of  these  bold,  gay  creatures.  He  did 
not  mind  being  a  kitchen  knave,  nor  the  taunts  of  Sir 
Kaye,  nor  the  mocking  of  Lynette  ;  and  when  Lancelot's 
spear  hurled  him  to  the  ground,  he  broke  out  into  frank 
laughter.  Nor  was  he  one  whit  daunted  by  the  magic 
horrors  of  Night  and  Death.  Fools  of  pageantry  he 
thought  them,  and  fools  they  are.  The  soul  that  laughs 
and  loves  and  rides  for  the  right,  has  the  world  at  his 
feet  while  he  is  young. 

Something  of  this  was  in  the  mind  of  Tennyson  when 
he  invented  and  added  to  the  story  the  symbolism  of  the 
knights  that  defended  the  fords  of  the  river.  The  first 
was  the  Morning-Star,  the  second  Noon-Sun,  the  third 
the  Evening-Star,  the  fourth  Night  and  Death.     One  by 


Idylls  of  the  King  277 

one  they  are  overthrown  by  Gareth.  His  youth  laughs 
at  the  attack  which  the  temptations  of  youth,  of  middle 
age,  of  the  evening  of  life,  of  death,  of  Time  itself,  make 
on  men — that  long,  wrathful  siege  of  battering  days. 
Tennyson  marks  this  meaning.  In  the  carved  allegory 
(a  thing  he  has  invented)  near  the  hermit's  cave,  the 
rock  bears  five  knights  with  the  names  Phosphorus^ 
Meridies,  Hesperus^  Nox^  and  Mors  sculptured  beneath 
them,  and  they  are  running  down  the  soul — 

A  Shape  that  fled 
With  broken  wings,  torn  raiment,  and  loose  hair 
For  help  and  shelter  to  the  hermit's  cave. 

It  is  "  the  war  of  Time,"  he  says,  "  against  the  soul  of 
man."  But  Gareth  conquers  all  of  them  by  audacity 
and  gaiety.  The  encounters  in  this  pageant  are  alike 
clear,  varied,  brief,  set  each  in  its  own  fair  landscape, 
and  the  sound  of  the  river  accompanies  them  with 
warlike  music.  They  are  real  enough,  but  they  are 
also  allegorical.  It  is  easy  for  the  faith  and  boldness  of 
youth  to  conquer  the  sins  and  troubles  of  the  dawn  of 
life  ;  it  is  harder  to  slay  those  of  its  noonday  ;  it  is 
harder  still  to  overcome  those  of  its  late  afternoon  ;  and 
Tennyson's  representation  of  the  Knight  of  the  Evening- 
Star  is  full  of  original  thought.  He  is  old  and  hard  ;  he 
blows  a  hard  and  deadly  note  upon  his  horn.  A  storm- 
beaten,  russet,  many-stained  pavilion  shelters  him.  A 
grizzled  damsel  arms  him  in  ancient  arms.  Beneath 
his  arms  a  hardened  skin  fits  close  to  his  body.  All 
is  different  from  that   which    the  commonplace  imagi- 


278  Tennyson 

nation  connects  with  the  evening  star.  We  see  the  po<.t's 
meaning  by  the  comparison  he  makes  to  illustrate  the 
difficulty  of  Gareth's  battle  against  the  Knight  of  (k< 
Evening-Star  : 

Till  Gareth  panted  hard,  and  his  great  heart, 

Foredooming  all  his  trouble  was  in  vain, 

Labour'd  within  him,  for  he  seem'd  as  one 

That  all  in  later,  sadder  age  begins 

To  war  against  ill  uses  of  a  life, 

But  these  from  all  his  life  arise,  and  cry, 

"  Thou  hast  made  us  lords,  and  canst  not  put  usdoww' 

Nor  is  the  representation  of  Night  and  Death,  both  of 
whom  one  champion  images,  less  imaginative.  The 
black  horse,  black  banner,  and  black  horn,  the  black 
armour  painted  with  the  white  skeleton  and  helmed  with 
the  skull,  are  the  ordinary  thing.  But  the  thunder  gloom 
under  which  he  rides,  the  chill  of  his  aspect  which 
strikes   ice  even  into   Lancelot,  his  huge  pavilion  which 

Sunders  the  glooming  crimson  on  the  marge, 

lift  the  work  Tennyson  does  beyond  the  ordinary.  And 
finally  we  reach  thought,  symbol,  and  full  imagination 
together,  when  (the  skull  cloven  by  Gareth  and  then  the 
helm)  there  issues  forth  from  the  black  terror  and  the 
deadly  chill  the  bright  face  of  a  blooming  boy,  "  fresh  as 
a  flower  new-born."  It  is  Tennyson's  view  of  Death,  it 
is  also  his  image  of  what  it  seems  to  youth,  to  gaiety,  to 
daring,  and  to  faith.  And  the  story  ends  with  the  preg- 
nant line  : 


Idylls  of  the  King  279 

So  large  mirth  lived,  and  Gareth  won  the  quest. 

All  this  part  of  the  tale  is  vivid  with  pictures,  touched 
with  happy  illustrations  drawn  from  Nature,*  and  stead- 
ily builds  up  into  fulness  the  character  of  Gareth.  But 
the  beginning  is  not  so  well  done.  The  scenes  between 
Gareth  and  his  mother,  who  strives  to  keep  him  under 
her  wing,  are  much  too  long,  and  the  mother's  dulness 
of  perception  when  Gareth  places,  in  two  illustrations, 
his  position  before  her,  and  her  last  argument,  that 
the  King  may  not  be  the  true  King,  and  therefore  Gareth 
must  stay  at  home,  are  quite  out  of  nature.  It  is  not  till 
Gareth  escapes,  and  is  on  his  journey  to  Lancelot,  that 
Tennyson  recovers  himself.  And  he  does  recover  him- 
self admirably  in  his  description    of  Camelot,  and  the 

*  Here  are  a  few  of  these  illustrations.  Gareth  cannot  wholly 
overthrow  the  Evening-Star,  no  more 

Than  loud  Southwesterns,  rolling  ridge  on  ridge, 
The  buoy  that  rides  at  sea,  and  dips  and  springs 
For  ever. 

This  also  of  the  honcN'Suckle  that  flies  about  the  cave  : 

Good  lord,  how  sweetly  smells  the  honeysuckle 
In  the  hush'd  night,  as  if  the  world  were  one 
Of  utter  peace,  and  love,  and  gentleness, 

might  have  been  said  by  Jessica  in  the  night  scene  in  Portia's  garden. 
Take  two  others.     The  first  likens  the  cloth  of   gold  which  Mark 
sends  to  Arthur  to 

A  field  of  charlock  in  the  sudden  sun 
Between  two  showers. 

That  is  as  quick-eyed  as  it  is  simple  and  true.     See  how  the  poet,  to 
make  our  sight  of  the  thing  more  brilliant,  puts  in  "  Between  two 


28o  Tennyson 

mystic  gate,  and  the  magic  music,  and  the  visionary  im- 
pression that  the  city  makes  upon  the  imagination,  and 
the  meeting  with  Merlin.  It  is  fine  invention,  and  many 
a  line  is  worth  a  magic  spell. 

Lastly,  the  first  of  the  types  of  womanhood  that  Ten- 
nyson draws  in  the  Idylls  is  Lynette,  a  fresh  and  frank 
young  person,  smart  and  thoughtless,  quick-tongued, 
over-rude,  over-bold  both  with  the  King  and  with  Lan- 
celot, but  honourable  and  pure  of  heart — the  petulant, 
impatient  type.  Such  a  woman  may  be  charming,  but 
Lynette's  sauciness  wants  charm,  just  because  too  much 
of  the  masculine  roughness  of  Tennyson  speaks  in  her. 
I  do  not  allude  to  her  rude  scorning  of  Gareth  as  the 
kitchen-knave  and  her  unsavoury  mocking  of  him,  for 
all  that  is  taken  directly  from  the  original  story  ;  but  to 
the  way  in  which  Tennyson  has  expressed  it,  especially 

showers,"  just  as  in  the  next  his  imagination  makes  the  plant  feel  its 
own  fate. 

Wan-sallow  as  the  plant  that  feels  itself 

Root-bitten  by  white  lichen. 

Gareth  drops  his  cloak,  and   breaks   bright    in  arms,  like  those 

Dull  coated  things,  that  making  slide  apart 
Their  dusk  wing-cases,  all  beneath  there  burns 
A  Jewell 'd  harness,  ere  they  pass  and  fly. 

And  the  shield  of  the  Noonday — 

As  if  the  flower, 
That  blows  a  globe  of  after  arrowlets. 
Ten  thousand-fold  had  grown,  flashed  the  fierce  shield, 
All  sun. 

These  come  out  of  the  full  treasury  Tennyson  had  cqllected  in  his 
mind  of  the  precious  sights  of  Nature. 


Idylls  of  the  King  281 

to  his  attempt  to  give  it  a  humorous  turn.  Lynette  in 
Malory's  hands  is  entirely  in  earnest,  and  her  character  is 
throughout  consistent.  She  repents  of  her  abuse,  but  she 
has  no  humour,  and  she  has  no  delicate  sentiment.  But 
in  Tennyson's  hands  we  cannot  quite  tell  whether  she  is  in 
earnest  or  not,  and  what  humour  there  is  attempted  is  like 
that  of  an  undergraduate.*  Lynette,  overdone  in  this  way, 
is  more  a  study  of  the  saucy  type  of  woman  than  a  real 
woman.  Moreover,  when  Tennyson  wants  to  improve 
her,  and  shows  fineness  of  nature  in  her,  he  divides  her 
from  herself.  She  becomes  full  of  sentiment,  and  when 
she  sings  those  charming  little  songs  which  one   by  one 

*Itis  curious  that  a  poet,  whose  humour  is  so  excellent  in 
The  Northertt  Farmer,  and  the  other  dialect  poems,  should  fail  so 
completely  when  he  tries  to  be  humorous  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King 
iind  in  the  Dramas.  When,  for  example,  Geraint  is  irritated  by  the 
villagers  who  answer  all  his  questions  by  talking  of  the  knight  who 
calls  himself  the  Sparrow-hawk,  he  cries  : 

A  thousand  pips  eat  up  your  sparrow-hawk  ! 

Tits,  wrens,  and  all  wing'd  nothings  peck  him  dead! 

Tennyson  means  him  to  be  spleenfully  humorous,  and  he  is  only 
absurd.  When  in  the  next  two  lines  he  leaves  humour  alone,  he  is 
excellent.     Geraint  cries  out  : 

Ye  think  the  rustic  cackle  of  your  bourg 

The  murmur  of  the  world  !  What  is  it  to  me  ? 

Then  he  tries  to  be  humorous  again  : 

O  wretched  set  of  sparrows,  one  and  all, 
That  pipe  of  nothing  but  of  sparrow-hawks  ! 

This  is  ridiculous  on  the  lips  of  a  stately  knight.  The  only  explana- 
^on  I  can  make  is  that  the  solemn  vehicle  of  heroic  blank  verse,  and 
especially  of  blank  verse  so  elaborate  and  academic  as  that  of  the 
idylls  of  the  King,  is  wholly  unfitted  for  the  expression  of  humour. 


282  Tennyson 

embody  the  change  of  her  view  of  Gareth,  they  are 
over-delicate  for  her  previous  character.     We  cannot  fit 

O  trefoil,  sparkling  on  the  rainy  plain, 
O  rainbow  with  three  colours  after  rain. 
Shine  sweetly  :  thrice  my  love  has  smiled  on  me, 

with  a  voice  like  this  : 

* 

Dish-washer  and  broach-turner,  loon  ! — to  me 
Thou  smellest  all  of  kitchen  as  before. 

Malory  does  not  make  that  mistake.  Lynette  is  one 
woman  in  his  hands.  In  Tennyson  she  is  two,  and  the 
two  do  not  agree. 

I  cannot  make  the  same  criticism  with  regard  to  Enid, 
whose  character  fills  the  next  two  Idylls,  The  Marriage 
of  Geraint  and  Geraint  and  Enid.  Enid  is  one  woman, 
both  as  girl  and  wife.  As  Lynette  is  the  type  of  petu- 
lance, so  Enid  is  the  type  of  patience.  She  is  Tenny- 
son's Griselda.  Lynette  is  audacious  and  free  of  tongue. 
Enid  is  silent  in  endurance  of  wrong.  She  is  silent  also 
when  she  ought  to  speak.  She  is  afraid  to  blame  Geraint 
for  his  sloth,  because  she  knows  he  is  slothful  from  love 
of  her.  And  her  fear,  falling  in  with  Geraint's  suspi- 
ciousness, makes  the  trouble  of  the  piece.  Patience, 
when  it  is  accompanied  by  fear  or  over-fancy,  is  turned 
from  doing  good  to  doing  wrong.  But,  independent  of 
this  evil  side  of  patience,  Tennyson  seems  to  like  this 
kind  of  womanhood.  Of  all  his  women,  Enid  is  the 
most    carefully   drawn,  the  most    affectionate.      She    is 


Idylls  of  the  King  283 

gracious,  but  she  is  one  of  those  women  who  do  a  great 
deal  of  harm  to  men.  The  defects  of  their  patience 
make  in  men  tyranny  and  selfishness,  jealous  overbear- 
ing and  ugly  suspicion.  In  bad  men  these  evils  grow 
worse,  till  the  man  turns  into  a  brute.  In  a  suspicious 
but  noble-hearted  man  as  Geraint  originally  was,  they 
produce,  and  often  with  startling  suddenness,  detestable 
conditions  of  mind  and  life,  out  of  which  men  like 
Geraint,  being  good  at  root,  are  shocked  back  again  into 
self-knowledge  and  repentance. 

This  effect,  however,  is  overdone  by  Tennyson.  It 
would  be  difficult  to  find,  outside  of  bad  men,  any  one 
whose  conduct  is  made  more  odious  than  Geraint's. 
Tennyson  could  not  have  recognised  how  far  apart  he 
wanders  from  what  we  call  honour,  nor  do  I  think  that 
his  conduct  is  sufficiently  motived  from  the  point  of 
view  of  art.  Only  the  madness  oi  jealousy,  and  not  mere 
suspicion,  is  enough  to  partly  excuse  all  he  thought  and 
all  he  did.  He  is  not  even  represented  as  having  suffi- 
cient cause  for  his  conduct.  He  is  expressly  said  not  to 
believe  in  Enid's  loss  of  honour.  Moreover,  from  the 
very  beginning  he  is  not  quite  a  gentleman.  A  few  days 
before  his  marriage,  he  doubts  Enid's  affection  for  him  : 
he  wishes  to  prove  her  obedience,  to  test  whether  it  is 
love  for  him  she  has,  or  desire  for  the  splendours  of  a 
Court.  If  she  will  at  a  word,  without  reason  given,  come 
in  her  shabby  dress  to  Court,  then  he  will  rest,  fixed  in 
her  faith. 

What  sort  of  a  man  is  this  ?     He.  at  least,  does  not 


284  Tennyson 

know  what  love  means  ;  lost  in  himself,  in  vanity  and 
suspicion.  There  is  nothing  of  this  suspicion  in  the 
original  story.  Geraint  there  is,  like  Leontes,  suddenly 
attacked  by  jealousy  and  its  special  anger  when  he  hears 
his  wife  say  that  he  is  not  the  man  he  was.  And  this 
furious  jealousy  motives  his  rude  conduct.  Jealousy 
maddens,  and  the  Welsh  writer,  careful  for  his  hero's 
repute,  expressly  says  that  for  the  time  he  was  insane. 
But  Tennyson  does  not  make  Geraint  jealous  in  this 
way,  nor  put  him  into  the  madness  of  jealousy.  He  is 
only  suspicious  and  angry,  and  his  conduct  to  Enid,  far 
worse  than  it  is  in  the  original,  has  not  cause  enough  at 
the  back  of  it  to  make  it  possible.  The  position  is  over- 
done. Nor  does  Tennyson's  short  introduction  to  the 
second  part  in  Geraint  and  Enid — 

O  purblind  race  of  miserable  men, 
How  many  among  us  at  this  very  hour 
Do  forge  a  life-long  trouble  for  ourselves 
By  taking  true  for  false,  or  false  for  true — 

give  a  sufficient  reason  for  the  meanness  of  Geraint. 
Many  men,  indeed,  lose  the  use  of  life  in  that  fashion, 
but  if  they  are  of  noble  nature,  as  Geraint  is  represented 
at  first,  they  do  not  fall  so  low  as  he,  they  do  not  quite 
dishonour  their  original  character,  they  do  not  lose  all 
chivalry  to  a  woman.  Or  if  they  do,  they  do  it  because 
they  believe  their  wife  to  be  utterly  false  to  them.  This 
cause  is  excluded  by  Tennyson.  Geraint  falls  too  low, 
and  his  fall  has  not  sufficient  motive.  Art  has  failed 
Tennyson. 


Idylls  of  the  King  285 

When  the  rumour  about  the  Queen  and  Lancelot  comes 
to  Geraint's  ear,  he  thinks  that  his  wife  may  suffer  taint 
because  she  is  the  Queen's  friend,  and  he  removes  her 
from  Court.  Then  he  forgets  all  his  duty  and  his  fame 
in  uxorious  love  of  her.  He  fights  no  more  ;  he  lets  his 
province  fall  into  confusion.  This  is  natural  enough, 
and  though  he  is  suspicious  and  feeble,  he  has  not  yet 
altogether  lost  gentlehood.  Men  laugh  at  him  for  his 
weakness.  His  wife  saddens,  and  seeing  her  sad,  his 
base  suspicion  that  she  is  tainted  deepens.  He  hears 
her  murmuring  one  morning  that  she  is  no  true  wife, 
and  leaps  at  once  to  the  conclusion  that  she  is  not  faith- 
ful in  thought  to  him,  bursts  out  into  a  reckless  passion, 
and  bids  her  ride  into  the  wilderness  with  him — utterly 
careless  of  her,  careful  only  for  himself.  When  he  meets 
the  first  three  bandits,  and  she  warns  him,  he  cries  :  "  If 
I  fall,  cleave  to  the  better  man  " — an  odious  insult.  In 
the  midst  of  all  this  wrath,  he  eats  like  a  man  who  has 
no  trouble,  and  jokes  at  the  mowers  whom  he  has  de- 
prived of  their  dinner.  When  Limours  (Enid's  old 
lover)  comes  into  the  inn,  and,  seeing  Enid  alone,  asks 
leave  to  speak  to  her,  Geraint  answers  : 

My  free  leave, 
Get  her  to  speak  ;  she  doth  not  speak  to  me. 

This  is  partly  in  the  original,  but  what  follows  is  not. 
While  Enid  sits  in  the  room,  Limours  drinks  and  jests 
and  tells  loose  tales.  Geraint  is  pleased,  and  bursts  into 
laughter  I    Then  it  is  that  he  gives  Limours  leave  to  tell 


286  Tennyson 

his  wife  of  his  love  to  her.  What  ensues  is  still  worse. 
Limours  is  slain  next  morning,  and  Geraint  (though  it 
is  Enid  herself  who  has  asked  Geraint  to  defend  her 
from  his  pursuit,  though  he  has  himself  almost  handed 
Enid  over  to  Limours)  calls  Limours  her  lover.  These 
vilenesses  are  added  by  Tennyson  to  the  Geraint  of  the 
old  tale.  There  is  not  a  trace  of  the  gentleman  left  in 
Geraint.  Limours  is  twice  the  lover  and  twice  the 
gentleman. 

All  this  is  overdone.  It  is  impossible  a  gentleman 
could  fall  so  low.  It  is  also  quite  out  of  character  with 
the  days  of  chivalry  in  which  the  original  story  took  its 
form.  Moreover,  as  I  said,  the  motive  is  not  sufficient. 
Nor  is  Arthur's  reproof  to  him  sufficient  punishment. 
His  punishment  ought  to  come  in  Enid's  ceasing  to  love 
him.  But  Enid  is  not  of  that  temper.  She  continues  to 
love  him  ;  but  I  wonder,  even  with  her,  whether  in  the 
future  there  was  not  some  mild  contempt  mingled  with 
her  love.  There  would  have  been  if  Geraint  fell  as  low 
as  Tennyson  makes  him  fall.  Enid's  love,  after  Geraint's 
conduct,  is  even  more  improbable  than  Griselda's. 

Independent  of  this  main  criticism,  the  poem  is  well 
wrought  and  full  of  beauty.  The  story  is  skilfully  intro- 
duced, continued,  and  ended.  The  pictorial  passages, 
and  these  are  brilliant,  are  full  of  many  happy  touches 
of  light  and  colour,  happy  asides  of  sentiment,  with 
epigrams  of  wisdom  and  thought  scattered  among  them 
like  jewels  on  a  golden  robe.  There  is  no  weariness  as 
we   read  :    the   eye  sees  something  new,   the  ear  hears 


Idylls  of  the  King  287 

some  fresh  sound,  the  heart  and  brain  are  stimulated 
from  line  to  line.  The  work  is  delightful  throughout 
from  this  point  of  view — concise,  chosen,  and  luminous. 
We  wish  nothing  out  of,  and  rarely  anything  into  the 
descriptions.  There  is  no  modern  poet  who  has  painted 
his  landscapes  in  fewer  words,  and  yet  who  painted 
all  that  was  needful  to  make  the  scene,  as  far  as  he 
chose  to  see  it,  leap  out  before  the  eyes  : 

So  thro'  the  green  gloom  of  the  wood  they  past, 

And  issuing  under  open  heavens  beheld 

A  little  town  with  towers,  upon  a  rock, 

And  close  beneath,  a  meadow  gemlike  chased 

In  the  brown  wild,  and  mowers  mowing  in  it ; 

And  down  a  rocky  pathway  from  the  place 

There  came  a  fair-hair'd  youth. 

He  has  rejected  every  unnecessary  detail.  I  think  he 
has  rejected  too  much  of  his  original,  which  I  give 
below,  but  he  is  judge.*  At  least,  he  has  carefully  kept 
the    human  figures.     The   mowers    mowing,    the   youth 

*  Here  is  the  original  in  Lady  Charlotte  Guest's  translation  of 
the  Mabinogion  :  "  And  early  in  the  day  they  left  the  wood,  and 
they  came  to  an  open  country,  with  meadows  on  one  hand,  and 
mowers  mowing  the  meadows.  And  there  was  a  river  before  them 
and  the  horses  bent  down  and  drank  the  water.  And  they  went  up 
out  of  the  water  by  a  lofty  steep,  and  there  they  met  a  tender  strip- 
ling, with  a  satchel  about  his  neck,  and  they  saw  that  there  was 
something  in  the  satchel,  but  they  knew  not  what  it  was.  And  he 
had  a  small  blue  pitcher  in  his  hand  and  a  bowl  on  the  mouth  of  the 
pitcher.     And  the  youth  saluted  Geraint,"  etc.,  etc. 

That  this  is  more  alive,  that  there  is  more  of  the  witchery  of  rep- 
resentation in  it  than  Tennyson's  lines,  illustrates  what  is  elsewhere 
said  of  the  loss  sometimes  in  his  natural  description  of  charm,  and 


288  Tennyson 

descending  the  path,  strike  forth  the  landscape.  From 
1842  onwards,  indeed  earlier  when  that  brilliant  appari- 
tion of  Paris  in  CEno?ie  issues  from  the  wood,  Tennyson 
rarely  painted  a  landscape  without  humanity,  and  he 
places  his  figures  with  all  the  skill  of  a  painter.  He 
knew  that  Nature  alone  was  not  half  as  delightful  as 
Nature  and  man  together.  Lover  of  Nature  as  he  was, 
he  avoided  the  crowning  fault  of  modern  poetry — the 
unmitigated  merciless  description  of  Nature,  trickling 
on  for  fifty  and  a  hundred  lines  together,  without  one 
touch  of  human  interest.  He  knew  the  great  masters — 
Homer,  Virgil,  and  the  rest  of  these  who  see  and  feel  at 
the  same  moment — too  well  to  fall  into  that  dreary  error. 
He  was  too  much  of  a  great  master  himself  to  com- 
mit it.  It  is  from  this  impassioned  mingling  of  the  soul 
and  sight  of  man  with  the  soul  and  sight  of  Nature  that 
the  specialised  loveliness  arises  which  charms  us,  and 
dignifies  itself,  in  the  descriptions  of  Tennyson.  There 
is  no  finer  example  of  this  than  in  Geraint's  first  sight 
of  Enid.  We  see  the  castle  courtyard,  the  ruined  tow- 
ers, with  all  their  grass  and  flowers  and  ivy,  as  with  the 
naked  eye.     But  in  the  midst  we  see  Geraint  and  Yniol, 

especially  of  livingness,  from  too  great  a  devotion  to  conciseness. 
The  river  is  gone,  and  the  horses  bending  to  drink  ;  and  the  river  is 
the  living  spirit  of  the  landscape.  I  am  sorry  also  to  lose  my  curi- 
osity about  the  satchel.  Above  all,  why  have  left  out  the  eye  of  the 
picture,  and  in  colour  too  ?  How  could  he  leave  out  the  blue  pitcher? 
Tennyson  had  no  intense  love  of  colour.  He  was  no  Venetian. 
Black  and  white  were  his  favourite  vehicles.  Few  of  his  shadows  are 
in  colour. 


Idylls  of  the  King  289 

and  then  we  hear  Enid  singing  and  the  castle  court  is 
filled  with  her.  Nothing  can  be  closer  to  nature  than 
these  lines,  which  describe  the  ivy  climbing  the  castle  ; 
every  word  is  alive  with  fact : 


And  monstrous  ivy-stems 
Claspt  the  gray  walls  with  hairy-fibred  arms, 
And  suck'd  the  joining  of  the  stones,  and  look'd 
A  knot,  beneath,  of  snakes — aloft,  a  grove. 


Wordsworth  would  have  given  a  life  of  its  own  to  that, 
but  Tennyson  draws  it  only  as  it  is,  leaves  it,  once  he 
has  brushed  it  in,  and  passes  on  to  fill  the  ancient  court 
with  youth  by  Enid's  voice,  and  to  make  her  voice 
awaken  fatherly  love  in  Yniol's  heart  and  passion  in 
Geraint's.  They  stand  still,  enthralled,  looking  up,  and 
listening.  And  Enid  sings  that  song  of  fortitude  in 
poverty,  of  the  mastery  of  the  soul  in  good  or  evil  fort- 
une, which  is  so  finely  written  that  it  speaks  the  very 
soul  of  enduring  manhood  and  womanhood  all  over 
the  world.*  There  is  as  much  strength  as  there  is 
beauty  in  the  whole  scene  ;  and  the  two  comparisons  of 
the  effect  on  Geraint  of  Enid's  voice  are  one  of  the 
noblest  instances  we  can  give  of  that  sweet  keen  deli- 
cacy in  Tennyson  which,  in  contrast  with  his  bluff  power, 
is  so  pleasant  a  surprise.     Let  me  quote  the  passage  : 

*  The  motive  comes  from  Dante  ;  hut  with  what  grace  and  beauty 
it  is  varied  and  enhanced  !     The  soul  of  the  girl  is  in  it,  and  the 
soul  of  the  situation.     And  it  fits,  enlightens,  strengthens,  and  con- 
soles those  everywhere  who  are  in  a  similiar  condition. 
'9 


290  Tennyson 

And  while  he  waited  in  the  castle  court, 

The  voice  of  Enid,  Yniol's  daughter,  rang 

Clear  thro'  the  open  casement  of  the  hall, 

Singing  ;  and  as  the  sweet  voice  of  a  bird, 

Heard  by  the  lander  in  a  lonely  isle. 

Moves  him  to  think  what  kind  of  bird  it  is 

That  sings  so  delicately  clear,  and  make 

Conjecture  of  the  plumage  and  the  form  ; 

So  the  sweet  voice  of  Enid  moved  Geraint ; 

And  made  him  like  a  man  abroad  at  morn 

When  first  the  liquid  note  beloved  of  men 

Comes  flying  over  many  a  windy  wave 

To  Britain,  and  in  April  suddenly 

Breaks  from  a  coppice  gemm'd  with  green  and  red,* 

And  he  suspends  his  converse  with  a  friend, 

Or  it  may  be  the  labour  of  his  hands, 

To  think  or  say,  "  There  is  the  nightingale  "  ; 

So  fared  it  with  Geraint,  who  thought  and  said, 

"  Here,  by  God's  grace,  is  the  one  voice  for    me." 

To  this  first  impression  of  her  Enid  is  true  through- 
out. Her  patience  is  too  overwrought  to  permit  us  to 
class  her  among  the  higher  types  of  womanhood — in- 
deed, these  very  patient  women  are  always  painted  by 
men — and  her  own  character  is  sometimes  overwhelmed 
by  the  allegorical  representation  of  patience  Tennyson 
makes  through  her.  But  when  we  ignore  this,  and  get 
down,  below  the  type,  to  her  natural  womanhood,  Enid 
is  full  of  truth  and  life.  When  she  hears  that  she  is 
loved  by  Geraint  and  lies  aw^ake  all  night  ;  when  she 
longs  to  be  beautifully  dressed  to  pleasure  her  lord  and 
do  him  credit  ;  when  she  slips  from  her  couch  into  her 

♦Chaucer  also  saw  these  spring  colours  of  the  young  trees— 
"  Some  very  red,  and  some  a  glad  light  green." 


Idylls  of  the  King  291 

golden  dress,  like  the  star  of  morn  from  a  bank  of  snow 
into  a  sunlit  cloud  ;  when  time  after  time  slie  warns 
Geraint  of  his  foes  ;  when  she  is  left  alone  in  the  bandit 
hall  and  thinks  Geraint  is  dead,  and  sends  the  power  of 
her  suffering  and  her  nature  into  the  rude  crowd,  she  is 
always  of  the  same  strength  and  gentleness,  always  sweet 
with  a  sacred  charm,  so  that  we  do  not  wonder  that 
Tennyson  was  so  moved  with  his  own  creation  as  to 
write  about  her  some  of  the  loveliest  lines  he  ever  wrote 
of  womanhood,  when  once  more  at  home  in  her  hus- 
band's heart  she  rides  away  with  him  from  the  savage 
lands  : 

And  never  yet,  since  high  in  Paradise 
O'er  the  four  rivers  the  first  roses  blew, 
Came  purer  pleasure  unto  mortal  kind 
Than  lived  thro'  her,  who  in  that  perilous  hour 
Put  hand  to  hand  beneath  her  husband's  heart, 
And  felt  him  hers  again  :  she  did  not  weep, 
But  o'er  her  meek  eyes  came  a  happy  mist 
Like  that  which  kept  the  heart  of  Eden  green 
Before  the  useful  trouble  of  the  rain. 

And  with  these  lines,  beautiful  with  a  paradise  of  tender- 
ness, I  leave  these  Idylls  of  Geraint  and  Enid. 

Balin  arid  Balan^  the  Idyll  next  in  order  in  the  com- 
pleted book,  was  the  last  published  by  Tennyson.  It 
shows  no  weariness  of  hand  or  brain,  no  lack  of  his  clear 
conciseness,  no  want  of  imaginative  presentation  either 
of  the  moods  of  men  or  Nature.  The  blank  verse  is  as 
skilful  and  robust  as  ever,  only  a  little  more  abrupt,  less 


292  Tennyson 

flowing  than  in  the  earlier  Idylls.  The  subject,  however, 
continually  demands  this  abruptness,  for  Balin  is  the 
incarnation  of  natural  violence  of  temper.  The  intellect- 
ual treatment  of  the  story  is  as  fine  as  the  imaginative. 
If  we  comjjare  the  tale  as  it  is  in  Malory  with  Tennyson's 
re-making  of  it  here  for  the  purpose  of  his  allegory,  we 
shall  understand  how  acutely,  skilfully,  and  profoundly 
the  coml)ining  intellect  has  built  up  the  skeleton  of  the 
tale  before  the  imaginative  passion  put  flesh  upon  it  and 
sent  the  blood  racing  through  it.  As  he  painted  in 
Geraint  suspicion  growing  into  rudeness  and  meanness, 
and  in  Edyrn  pride,  or  rather  arrogance — and  these  evil 
things  as  enemies  of  the  soul  of  man — so  he  paints  in 
Balin  the  general  idea  of  furious  anger  as  anotlier  enemy 
of  the  soul.  Balin,  for  Tennyson  clings  at  times  to  the 
theory  of  heredity,  drew  this  temper  from  his  father. 
He  was  begotten  in  an  hour  of  wrath.  He  was  banished 
from  the  Table  Round  for  an  outbreak  of  violence. 
He  is  restored  to  it  by  Arthur  and  begins  to  learn  gentle- 
ness from  Lancelot  and  the  King.  But  his  moods,  born 
in  his  blood,  leap  on  him  like  fiends,  and  he  despairs. 
The  gentle  temper  of  the  Court  is  too  high  for  him,  and 
he  takes  to  the  wild  woods  again,  his  rage  now  turned 
upon  himself — the  chained  rage  "which  yelpt  within 
him  like  a  hound."  Struggle  after  struggle  he  makes 
against  himself  ;  and  well,  and  with  an  imaginative  ethic, 
these  are  varied  and  drawn  by  Tennyson.  The  last 
struggle  is  that  which  he  makes  by  keeping  before  his 
eyes  the  Queen's  crown  upon  his  shield.     But  the  good 


Idylls  of  the  King  293 

this  is  to  him  is  destroyed  when  he  hears  from  Vivien 
that  the  Queen  is  false  to  Arthur  and  with  Lancelot. 
His  two  ideals  are  overthrown.  He  bursts  into  frenzy, 
tramples  on  his  shield,  and  Balan,  his  brother,  mis- 
takes his  unearthly  yell  for  the  cry  of  the  Demon  of  the 
Wood.  Ignorant  of  their  brotherhood,  these  two  charge 
one  another,  and  both  fall  wounded  to  the  death. 
Vivien  removes  their  helms,  they  recognise  each  other, 
and  their  farewell  is  one  of  the  most  pathetic  things 
which  Tennyson  has  written. 

"  O  brother,"  answered  Balin,  "  woe  is  me  ! 
My  madness  all  thy  life  has  been  thy  doom, 
Thy  curse,  and  darken'd  all  thy  day  ;  and  now 
The  night  has  come.     I  scarce  can  see  thee  now. 
Good-night !  for  we  shall  never  bid  again 
Good-morrow.     Dark  my  doom  was  here,  and  dark 
It  will  be  there.     I  see  thee  now  no  more. 
I  would  not  mine  again  should  darken  thine. 
Good-night,  true  brother." 

Balan  answered  low, 
"  Good  night,  true  brother  here  1  Good-morrow  there  ! 
We  two  were  born  together,  and  we  die 
Together  by  one  doom  :  "  and  while  he  spoke 
Closed  his  death-drowsing  eyes,  and  slept  the  sleep 
With  Balin,  either  lock'd  in  cither's  arm.* 

This  study  of  Tennyson's  of  Anger  is  quite  original, 
and  is  made  vivid  by  other  characters  clustered  round  it 
which    exhibit  different   aspects  of  the  same  passion,  of 

*  Compare  Mrs.  Barbauld's 

"  Say  not  Good  Night, — but  in  some  brighter  clime 
Bid  me  Good  Morning." 


294  Tennyson 

the  means  to  overcome  it,  and  of  the  powers  opposed  to 
it.  It  would  be  interesting  to  make  a  full  comparison 
of  it  with  the  various  Angers  of  Spenser — with  the  Wrath 
in  the  chariot  of  Pride,  with  the  Furor  of  the  second 
book  of  The  Faerie  Queene,  with  the  Frenzy  of  Pyrochles 
and  Cymochles.  In  Si)enser  these  characters  are  wholly 
allegorical.  In  Balin  and  Balati  the  human  element  is 
greater  than  the  allegorical.  The  inevitableness  of 
Balin's  fate  makes  the  pity  of  it.  The  constant  love  of 
the  two  brothers  is  drawn  with  as  much  tenderness  as 
beauty,  and  the  ethical  lesson  which  is  indirectly  given 
by  their  story  does  not  arise  from  the  allegory  but  from 
their  human  fates,  their  sorrow  and  their  love. 

Again,  two  new  elements  are  introduced  into  the 
general  representation,  directly  opposed  one  to  the  other 
— asceticism  in  King  Pellam,  and  luxury  (in  the  old 
sense  of  the  word)  in  Vivien.  Pellam,  leaving  human 
wrongs  to  right  themselves,  retires  to  his  castle,  lichen- 
bearded  and  grayly  draped  with  streaming  grass — 

A  house  of  bats,  in  every  tower  an  owl — 

scarcely  eats,  repudiates  his  wife,  and  lets  neither  dame 
nor  damsel  enter  his  gates,  lest  he  should  be  polluted. 
Tennyson's  hatred  of  asceticism,  of  monkery,  of  the 
gloom  and  curse  of  it,  is  here  accentuated.  It  has  risen 
far  beyond  that  which  he  felt  when  he  wrote  Simeon 
Stylites.  He  intensifies  it  when  he  represents  King  Pel- 
lam as  taking  it  up  from  spiritual  conceit  and  to  spite 
King  Arthur.     Moreover,  he  attacks  the  chief  evil  which 


Idylls  of  the  King  295 

follows  asceticism  when  he  makes  Garlon,  King  Pellam's 
son,  into  the  lover  of  Vivien  the  harlot,  and  places  his 
lair  in  a  cave,  so  black  that  it  is  like  the  mouth  of  hell. 
This  horror  of  asceticism,  of  all  religious  views  which 
separate  men  from  doing  the  work  of  justice  and  love 
in  the  open  world,  is  fully  developed,  but  in  a  different 
way,  in  The  Holy  Grail. 

Vivien  is  the  other  element,  now  for  the  first  time 
brought  into  the  whole  poem.  She  is  here  altogether 
allegorical,  the  incarnation  of  that  impurity  of  sense 
which  is,  in  Tennyson's  mind,  the  bitterest  enemy  the 
soul  can  have,  which  more  than  all  else  breaks  up  and 
ruins  not  only  States  but  also  the  powers  by  which  States 
are  made  and  held  together — justice,  knowledge,  har- 
mony, order,  truth,  true  love,  man's  energy  and  woman's 
insight.  All  go  down  before  her  attack,  and  the  next 
Idyll  develops  her  fully. 

Lastly,  the  descriptive  power  of  Tennyson,  which  in 
the  previous  Idylls  is  concentrated  into  separate  pas- 
sages, is  here  diffused  through  the  whole.  When  we 
have  finished  the  Idyll,  we  see  the  whole  wood — great 
trees,  dense  underwood,  sweet  springs,  wolf-like  caves, 
lonely  castles,  long  avenues  of  trees,  green  glades, 
shadowy  demons  and  hoar-headed  woodmen  in  it.  It  is 
not  separately  described  ;  it  grows  up,  as  the  wood  of 
Arden  grows  before  us,  from  notes  of  woodland  scat- 
tered among  the  action  of  the  piece  ;  and  a  delightful 
example  it  is  of  an  artist's  work. 

There  is,  however,  one  little  touch  of  direct  descrip- 


296  Tennyson 

tion  of  Nature  in  this  Idyll  which  enables  me,  by  con- 
trasting it  with  Coleridge's  image  of  the  same  thing,  to 
mark  out  a  quality  in  Tennyson's  natural  description. 
There  is  a  spring  in  the  wood,  and  the  spring  makes  a 
clear  pool  with  a  sandy  bottom.  Tennyson  looks  into 
the  spring,  and  sees  the  sand  leaping  up  under  the  water- 
glass,  impelled  by  the  fountain  jet.  Balin  and  Balan  sit 
statuelike — 

To  right  and  left  the  spring,  that  down 
From  underneath  a  pUime  of  lady  fern 
Sang,  and  the  sand  danced  at  the  bottom  of  it. 

The  thing  to  be  seen  is  perfectly  clear,  and  no  poet  in 
the  world  could  put  it  into  a  shorter  phrase.  This  is 
Tennyson's  brief,  concise  method,  and  it  has  its  special 
value.  And  now  let  us  hear  Coleridge  telling  the  same 
story  of  the  spring  and  the  dancing  sand  : 

This  sycamore,  oft  musical  with  bees — 

Such  tents  the  Patriarchs  loved  !     O  long  unharmed 

May  all  its  aged  boughs  o'er-canopy 

The  small  round  basin  which  this  jutting  stone 

Keeps  pure  from  fallen  leaves  !      Long  may  the  spring, 

Quietly  as  a  sleeping  infant's  breath, 

Send  up  cold  waters  to  the  traveller 

With  soft  and  even  pulse  !     Nor  ever  cease 

Yon  tiny  cone  of  sand  its  soundless  dance 

Which  at  the  bottom,  like  a  Fairy's  page, 

As  merry  and  no  taller,  dances  still. 

Nor  wrinkles  the  smooth  surface  of  the  fount. 

The  comparison  of  these,  for  the  purpose  of  saying 
which  is  the  best,  would  not  be  fair,  for  Tennyson,  as  I 
have  said  already,  refrains  deliberately  in  these  stories, 


Idylls  of  the   King  297 

lest  the  human  interest  should  be  overwhelmed,  from 
any  set  description  of  Nature  ;  and  Coleridge  has  given 
himself  wholly  to  such  description.  Nevertheless,  the 
two  pieces  illustrate  two  methods — the  concise  and  the 
expanded — of  describing  Nature  ;  and  Tennyson,  as  he 
grew  older,  loved  and  used  the  concise  method  more  and 
more.  We  meet  very  rarely  in  his  later  work  anything 
like  the  long  description  of  the  land  around  the  town  of 
Lincoln  in  The  Gai'dcncrs  Daughter.  It  was  his  way, 
and  we  are  grateful  for  it ;  but,  on  the  whole,  I  love 
Coleridge's  way  better.  It  is  more  pleasant  that  the 
piece  of  Nature  we  have  to  see  should  be  dwelt  on  with 
curious  love,  coloured  as  well  as  outlined,  played  with 
by  the  imagination,  as  when  Coleridge  turns  the  cone  of 
sand  into  a  fairy's  page,  as  merry  and  no  taller,  dancing 
alone.  This  pleases  more,  and  I  feel  in  it  the  life  that  is 
in  Nature  more  than  in  the  other.  But  Tennyson  is  no 
less  the  artist  than  Coleridge,  only  he  is  an  artist  of  an- 
other kind.  We  should  feel  ourselves  happy  to  have 
these  different  musicians  of  Nature,  whose  varying  har- 
monies fit  our  changing  moods  ;  for  it  is  not  by  saying 
that  one  poet  is  better  than  another  that  we  shall  win  a 
good  delight  for  ourselves,  or  learn  how  to  see  or  com- 
pany with  beauty.  It  is  by  loving  each  of  them  for  his 
proper  work,  and  by  our  gratitude  to  them  all. 

There  are  two  things  which,  according  to  Tennyson, 
break  up  the  Table  Round  ;  which  first  decay  and  then 
destroy  the  work  of  Arthur.     The  first  of  these  is  the 


298  Tennyson 

lust  of  the  flesh,  and  the  second  is  mystic-ascetic  re- 
ligion. Merlin  and  Vivien  represents  the  first,  and  The 
Holy  Grail  the  second.  Tennyson  expresses  in  them  the 
set  of  his  mind  towards  two  recurring  problems  of  soci- 
ety. He  looked,  and  in  the  direst  light,  on  the  growth 
of  sensuality,  on  the  indifference  to  purity,  on  the 
loosening  of  the  marriage  vow,  on  the  unchaste  results 
of  luxury  of  life,  on  the  theory  and  practice  of  free  love, 
as  one  of  the  worst  evils,  and  perhaps  the  worst,  which 
can  inflict  individual,  social,  and  national  life.  The  sin 
of  Lancelot  and  Guinevere,  which  he  takes  care  to  rep- 
resent as  induced  by  a  love  almost  irresistible  and  as 
supported  by  unbroken  faithfulness,  and  whicli  does  not 
therefore  wholly  destroy  the  noble  elements  in  their 
characters,  is  nevertheless  (though  "  the  light  that  led 
astray  seemed  light  from  heaven,"  though  every  excuse 
that  can  be  made  for  it  is  made)  the  primal  cause  of  the 
ruin  that  follows.  The  sin  of  these  two  high-placed  per- 
sons, however  modified  in  them,  initiated  and  licensed 
an  unmodified  guilt  of  a  similar  kind,  and  brought  with 
it  when  it  was  committed  by  others  not  as  noble  as 
Lancelot  or  Guinevere,  lightness  of  character,  loose 
desire,  scorn  of  truth  and  honesty  in  the  things  of 
love,  and  naturally  in  other  matters  ;  and,  finally,  a 
luxurious  life,  in  which  the  doing  of  justice  and  the 
support  of  good  government  were  neglected  for  sensual 
enjoyment. 

There  is  a  difference  between  Lancelot,  faithful  all  his 
life  to  one  love,  and  Gawain  who  lightly  flies  from  one 


Idylls  of  the  King  299 

to  another  all  his  life  ;  between  Lancelot,  whose  love 
was  mingled  with  a  vast  remorse,  and  Tristram  who  in 
the  Idyll  of  The  Last  Tournametit  has,  in  the  airy  cyni- 
cism of  free  loving,  become  careless  of  faithfulness,  and 
then  uncourteous  towards  the  woman  whom  he  once 
loved  so  well.  Nevertheless,  it  was  not  in  Tennyson's 
way  to  finally  excuse  Lancelot  and  Guinevere  because 
they  loved  faithfully.  He  brings  all  the  ruin  back  to 
them.  It  is  their  guilt  also  which  made  the  invasion  of 
the  Court  by  Vivien  possible — that  is,  through  their 
love,  with  all  its  faithfulness,  the  lust  of  the  flesh  stole 
in,  and  the  whole  of  society  Avas  corrupted.  Again  and 
again  this  point  is  made  by  Tennyson.  No  matter  how 
seeming  fair  an  unlicensed  love  may  be,  no  matter  how 
faithful  and  how  deep,  it  ends  in  opening  to  others  the 
door  to  sensuality,  which  itself  has  no  faithfulness,  no 
depth,  and  no  enduring  beauty.  Guinevere  is  followed 
by  Vivien,  and  Lancelot  by  Tristram.  That  is  his 
view,  and  I  give  it  without  comment.  It  is  part  of 
the  ethical  message  Tennyson  chose  to  set  forth  for 
our  society. 

But  the  state  of  things  to  which  he  finally  brings  Ar- 
thur's Court  and  realm — the  state  of  which  Vivien  is  the 
true  queen — is  not  reached  at  once.  There  are  reactions 
against  it,  and  such  a  reaction  is  described  in  The  Holy 
Grail.  It  was  not  a  useful  nor  a  permanent  reaction, 
though  it  was  a  religious  one.  On  the  contrary,  it  did 
as  much  harm  to  the  State  and  to  Arthur's  work  as  the 
sensualism.     But  then  it  would  not  have  done  so  much 


300  Tennyson 

harm  had  it  not  been  for  the  previous  existence  of  the 
sensualism.  That  had  weakened  not  only  individual 
moral  power,  but  the  collective  force  of  righteous  states- 
manship, so  that  work  for  the  good  of  the  whole  people 
no  longer  seemed  the  best  and  wisest  thing.  It  was  bet 
ter,  men  who  were  half  repenting  of  a  sinful  life  began 
to  think,  to  pursue  after  a  mystic  and  ascetic  holiness 
than  to  live  naturally  in  the  present  world  and  strive  to 
make  it  wiser  and  happier.  It  was  better,  or  pleasanter, 
to  seek  for  supernatural  excitements  of  religious  passion 
than  to  confirm  the  good  and  deliver  the  oppressed  and 
walk  humbly  with  God  in  the  common  duties  of  home, 
society,  and  the  State.  This  is  only  another  form  of 
sensualism,  or  its  probable  consequence.  The  unbridled 
life  according  to  the  senses  induces  a  condition  both  of 
body  and  mind  which  cannot  do  without  excitement. 
When,  therefore,  as  in  Arthur's  realm,  there  is  a  reaction 
against  sensualism  and  folk  turn  to  religion,  they  de- 
mand a  religion  which  replaces  the  sensual  by  a  spiritual 
thrill,  or  by  the  excitement  of  the  miraculous  ;  which 
revels  in  the  mystic  ectasies  of  ascetic  purity ;  which 
thinks  that  human  love  injures  the  love  of  God  ;  and 
which  takes  men  and  women  away  from  their  nearest 
duties. 

This,  in  Tennyson's  mind,  was  a  deadly  misfortune, 
not  only  for  the  spiritual  life  of  the  individual,  but  for 
the  civic  life  of  societies.  In  making  this  clear,  he 
spoke  another  part  of  what  he  conceived  to  be  his  mes- 
sage to  his  time.     How  far  he  was  right  is  not  the  ques- 


Idylls  of  the  King  301 

tion  here,  but  what  he  thought  is.  He  was  of  the 
school  of  Maurice  and  Kingsley  in  this  matter.  He 
deliberately  attacked  in  The  Holy  Grail,  but  with  some 
of  a  poet's  tolerance  and  pity,  this  kind  of  piety.  He 
allowed  the  possibility  of  its  truth  and  fitness  in  a  few 
persons  of  the  temper  of  Galahad  and  Percivale's  sister. 
He  abhorred  it  in  the  generality  of  men  and  women. 
Its  origin  was  chiefly  in  the  senses,  and  its  end  was  the 
dissolution  of  all  true  work  for  mankind.  This  is  the 
aim  of  The  Holy  Grail. 

Our  question  now  is,  In  what  manner,  from  the  lit- 
erary point  of  view,  has  he  done  this  double  piece  of 
work — this  attack  on  impurity  and  on  ascetic  and  sensa- 
tional religion  ?  For  the  work  is  not  only  allegorical,  it 
is  also  a  story  ;  not  only  symbolic  but  human.  In  what 
fashion,  then,  are  wrought,  first  Merlin  and  Vivien  and 
then  The  Holy  Grail  ? 

The  conception  of  Vivien,  from  the  allegorical  point 
of  view,  is  always  careful  and  sometimes  fine,  and  keeps 
close  to  the  traditional  symbolism  of  Luxuria.  She  is 
born  of  rebellion,  that  is,  of  disobedient  pride.  Her 
father  dies  fighting  against  Arthur.  Her  mother  brings 
her  forth  on  the  battle-field,  and,  giving  her  birth,  falls 
dead.  She  is  thus  cradled  in  bloody  war,  war  for  which 
there  is  no  greater  cause  in  all  history  than  the  lust  of 
the  flesh.  She  is  also  cradled  in  death  :  "  Born  from 
death  am  I,"  she  says,  "  among  the  dead,"  for  sin  and 
death  are  woven  together,  warp  and  woof.  The  first  of 
sins  in  the  mind  of  the  ancient  Church  is  pride,  and  the 


302  Tennyson 

second  lust,  and  death  is  their  child.  Milton  in  his 
mighty  symbolism  makes  Satan,  immediately  after  his 
rebellion,  give  birth  to  Sin  from  his  head,  and  then, 
burning  for  her  beauty,  beget  Death  upon  her  ;  and 
Death,  in  turn,  unites  himself  in  unnatural  guilt  to  his 
mother  Sin.  This  is  a  horror  terrible  enough  for  the 
Titanic  imagination  of  Milton.  Tennyson's  symbolism 
falls  far  below  that  huge  conception  ;  but  then  his  story 
interfered  with  his  allegory,  as  his  allegory  interferes 
with  his  story. 

Vivien,  thus  bound  up  with  death,  causes  physical 
war  and  death.  She  also  leaves  behind  her  moral 
death  in  men's  souls,  and  death  of  law  and  order  in 
States. 

Another  symbolic  touch  is  given  when  she  says  that 
she  was  "  sown  upon  the  wind."  Perhaps  Tennyson 
thought  of  the  text,  **  They  that  sow  the  wind  shall 
reap  the  whirlwind  "  ;  but  the  main  thought  is  the  in- 
constancy and  fierceness  of  the  lust  of  the  flesh,  its  veer- 
ing and  flittering  fancy,  its  tempest-wrath  and  fury  at 
other  times  ;  and  it  is  in  the  yelling  of  the  storm  that 
Vivien  has  her  way  with  Merlin.  Then  she  is  corrupted 
by  Mark,  king  of  Cornwall,  whose  life  and  Court  are  set 
opposite  to  Arthur's.  Injustice,  falsehood,  cruelty  are 
his  characteristics,  and  out  of  these  are  born  coarse 
cynicism  in  sensualism,  and  hatred  of  pure  love.  Vivien, 
under  his  tuition,  is  shown  the  truth  betimes — 

That  old  true  filth  and  bottom  of  the  well 
Where  Truth  is  hidden. 


Idylls  of  the  King  303 

Therefore  when  she  hears  of  the  vows  of  chastity  at  the 
Court  of  Arthur,  she  does  not  believe  that  a  single  one 
of  the  knights  is  pure.  Absolute  unbelief  in  good  is 
part  of  the  mere  lust  of  the  flesh.  With  it  is  hatred  of 
those  who  differ  from  herself,  and  deep  hatred  makes 
her  cruel,  fearless,  and  deceitful.  Then,  there  is  noth- 
ing she  does  so  easily  as  lying,  and  the  lying,  combined 
with  hatred  and  unbelief  of  goodness,  causes  her  to  be 
the  furious  slanderer,  or  the  soft-sliding  suggester  of 
slander.  This  is  Tennyson's  outline  of  sensuality  and 
of  its  attendant  sins. 

This  allegorical  outline  is  filled  up  carefully,  and  in 
nothing  better  than  in  Vivien's  sincerity.  She  makes  a 
bold  defence  of  the  lust  of  the  flesh  being  the  proper 
god  and  king  of  the  world.  Of  this  god  she  is  the  wor- 
shipper, the  priestess,  and  the  missionary.  There  is  a 
song  of  hers  in  Bah'ti  and  Balan  which  glorifies  the  fire 
of  the  appetites  and  senses.  It  might  have  been  writ- 
ten for  the  worship  of  Astarte,  and  it  is  splendidly 
imagined  by  Tennyson.  It  sets  the  sensual  side  of 
pagan  Nature-worship  into  the  keenest  contrast  with 
the  self-control  of  Christianity.  The  fire  from  heaven 
she  speaks  of  is  not  the  holy  fire  of  the  pure  spirit  ;  it  is 
the  fire  of  that  heaven  which  some  have  conceived,  and 
which  consists  in  the  full  enjoyment  of  desire.  It  is 
this  blaze  of  desire  which  she  sees  in  all  Nature  as 
well  as  in  man,  and  it  creates,  she  thinks,  the  real  beauty 
of  the  world.  Tennyson  got  to  the  heart  of  the  thing 
in  this  exultant  pagan  song.     Take  the  two  last  verses  : 


304  Tennyson 

The  fire  of  Heaven  is  on  the  dusty  ways. 

The  wayside  blossoms  open  to  the  blaze. 

The  whole  wood-world  is  one  full  peal  of  praise. 

The  fire  of  Heaven  is  not  the  flame  of  Hell. 

The  fire  of  Heaven  is  lord  of  all  things  good, 
And  starve  not  thou  this  fire  within  tliy  blood, 
But  follow  Vivien  thro'  the  fiery  flood  ! 
The  fire  of  Heaven  is  not  the  flame  of  Hell ! 

Then  turning  to  her  squire  :   "  This  fire  of  Heaven, 
This  old  sun-worship,  boy,  will  rise  again. 
And  beat  the  cross  to  earth,  and  break  the  King 
And  all  his  Table."  * 

This  is  Vivien  as  she  is — honest,  true,  and  bold,  con- 
fessing evil  and  rejoicing  in  it.  I'he  whole  sketch  of 
her  in  Balin  and  Balan  is  of  this  strain  of  triumphant 
daring.  Her  tale  of  slander  about  the  Queen  is  there 
delivered  with  a  ring  of  conquest  in  it.  Her  mocking 
of  her  boy  squire  and  of  Balan  has  the  bravery  of  a 
Queen  of  sin.  She  laughs  loud  at  the  fools  of  knights 
who  have  cast  away  their  lives  when  they  were  goodly 
enough  to  have  "  cropt  the  myriad  flower  of  May."  She 
has  not  only  no  pity,  but  active  cruelty.  Come,  she 
cries  to  her  squire,  I  cannot  brook  to  look  upon  those 
wounded  to  the  death — leave  them  to  the  wolves. 

It  is  a  fine  sketch — better,  I  think,  than  anything  con- 
tained in  Vivien  and  Merlin  itself.     In  that  Idyll  Vivien 

*  See  in  The  Holy  Grail  what  the  Paynim  people  say  to  Sir  Bors  : 

What  other  fire  than  he 
Whereby  the  blood  beats,  and  the  blossom  blows, 
And  the  sea  rolls,  and  all  the  world  is  warmed. 


Idylls  of  the  King  305 

comes  to  the  Court.  She  creeps  and  whispers  through  it, 
sowing  the  seeds  of  slander  and  of  her  own  impurity. 
She  leavens  the  lowest  characters,  as  Arthur  does  the 
highest.  She  fixes  the  scandal  of  Lancelot  and  Guine- 
vere in  all  men's  minds  ;  and  finally  flies  away  with 
Merlin  that  she  may  destroy  his  use  and  name  and  fame 
by  the  spell  which  consigns  him  to  a  living  tomb.  The 
incarnation  of  the  pure  intellect  is  ruined  by  the  lust  of 
the  flesh. 

There  is  no  need  to  tell  the  story  of  this  Idyll.  It 
is  excessively  disagreeable,  but  it  is  chiefly  disagree- 
able because  its  form  is  ill-conceived.  The  main 
tale  is  as  old  as  humanity.  It  is  the  tale  of  knowledge, 
of  experience,  of  philosophy  made  foolish  in  old  age 
by  a  woman,  that  she  may  gain  the  glory  of  a  con- 
quest at  which  she  will  laugh  for  a  week  with  the 
young.  It  is  so  common  that  it  has  formed  one  of  the 
folk-tales  of  the  world.  The  most  famous  of  these  is 
the  bridling  and  saddling  of  Aristotle  by  the  mistress  of 
Alexander,  and  her  riding  the  philosopher  up  and  down 
the  garden  paths  in  the  sight  of  the  king.  Tennyson 
re-invents  this  common  tale,  and  his  way  of  doing  it  is 
open  to  the  gravest  criticism.  There  are  noble  episodes 
in  the  poem,  passages  of  fine  ethical  quality,  passages 
of  creative  imagination  ;  but  as  a  whole,  and  especially 
in  the  conceptions  of  Merlin  and  Vivien,  it  is  not  only 
in  the  wrong,  but  unpleasantly  in  the  wrong. 

Vivien  almost  ceases  to  be  allegorical,  and  is  repre- 
sented as  a  woman.     She  is  endurable   as   long  as    she 


J 


06  Tennyson 


symbolises  the  Lust  of  the  flesh.     We  know  that  in  the 
reahn  of  allegory   the  personification   of  Luxuria  must 
be  made  devoid  of  any  possibility  of  good.     But    when 
Vivien  is  made  a  woman,  as  in  this  Idyll,  she  is    detest- 
able.    Absolute  falsehood,  unredeemed  meanness,"  mo- 
tiveless malignity,"  are  not  found  in  sane  humanity,  and 
Vivien  is  all  the  three.     She  is  not  a  woman  at  all.     Not 
even  the  very  worst  of  her  type  was  ever  like  her.  This  na- 
tive inhumanity  makes  her  ways  and  speeches  unnatural, 
and  because  unnatural,  vulgar.     All  the  art  of  the  piece, 
because  of  this  error  in  form   by  which  Vivien   the  wo- 
man is  confused  with  Vivien  as  Luxuria,  is  not  good  in  art. 
The  immense  skill  Tennyson  bestows  upon  it  is  wasted. 
The  conception  of  Merlin  is  equally  unnatural.     The 
story  of  an  old  man    allured    to   his  ruin  by   a    young 
woman  is  in    itself   almost  too  disagreeable    for  art  to 
take  as  a  subject  ;  but  if  it  be  taken,  it  ought  to  be  kept 
within  nature  ;    it  ought  not    to  be  made   revolting  ;  it 
ought  to  be  excused  and  made  piteous  by  a  kind  of  mad- 
ness in  the  man.     And  this  is  done  in  the  original  tale  in 
Malory.     Merlin  there  falls  into  a  dotage  ;  he  is  "  assot- 
ted  "  by  one  of  the  Ladies  of  the    Lake.     Love    in    an 
old  man,  the  most  miserable  and  cruel  of  all  the  forms 
of  passion,  turns  the  wise  magician  into  a  fool  ;  and  the 
Lady  of  the  Lake,  herself  quite  pure,  but  weary  to  death 
of  him,  works  the  spell  upon  him  and  buries  him  under 
a  rock.     This  is  natural  and  human,  and   it   wakens  our 
sorrow  and  pity  ;   moreover,  it  excuses  the  man   and  the 
woman.     But  Tennyson  has  chosen  to  work  it  otherwise. 


Idylls  of  the  King  307 

Merlin  is  not  in  love  ;  he  only  wavers  on  the  verge  of 
affection.  He  has  not  lost  his  senses  or  his  sense.  He 
is  as  wise  as  ever  ;  he  sees  through  Vivien  ;  he  even  hates 
her  character,  her  slander,  and  her  foulness  of  soul  ;  he 
suspects  she  wants  to  destroy  his  use  and  fame  and 
name — and  yet  he  yields.  Up  to  the  last  moment  he  is 
in  full  possession  of  his  good  sense,  and  then  he  is  swept 
away  by  the  woman's  importunity,  by  a  momentary 
warming  of  his  blood.  He  is  made  by  this,  not  an  ob- 
ject of  pity,  but  of  contempt.  Had  he  been  in  love, 
he  would  have  been  a  fool  as  Vivien  calls  him  ;  but  he 
would  have  been  assotted,  in  a  dotage  from  the  be- 
ginning. As  it  is,  he  is  not  mad,  not  a  fool,  but  he  is 
suddenly  self-degraded.  And  yet  he  says  nothing  base, 
which  makes  the  art  of  the  piece  all  the  worse.  The 
conditions  and  the  position  are  out  of  Nature  ;  or,  if 
such  a  thing  can  be  in  Nature,  it  is  too  improbable  for 
art  to  use  as  a  subject,  and  too  ugly. 

Of  course,  to  make  such  a  conception  endurable  at 
all,  the  greatest  intellectual  skill  has  to  be  employed, 
and  Tennyson  labours  at  the  situation  he  has  invented. 
It  is  done  by  the  understanding,  not  by  the  imagination  ; 
for  the  imagination  would  refuse  to  work  at  this  false 
conception.  The  speeches  Merlin  and  Vivien  make  are 
concocted,  not  created.  The  worst  of  them  are  Vivien's. 
Tennyson  had  some  notion  of  what  the  man  would  say, 
but  he  did  not  know  what  the  woman — and  especially 
this  type  of  woman — was  likely  to  say.  His  ignorance 
of  such  women  does  not  make  his  work  better.     Never- 


3o8  Tennyson 

iheless,  in  the  midst  of  this  main  current  of  the  story 
there  are  islands  of  noble  poetry  ;  and  there  are  episodes, 
apart  from  the  story,  which  belong  to  the  pure  imagina- 
tion. One  part,  even  of  Vivien's  representation,  is  ad- 
mirable. It  is  her  outburst  of  false  tenderness,  during 
which  she  sings  the  song  of  "  Trust  me  not  at  all,  or  all 
in  all,"  which  begins  : 

In  love,  if  love  be  love,  if  love  be  ours, 
Faith  and  unfaith  can  ne'er  be  equal  powers ; 
Unfaith  in  aught  is  want  of  faith  in  all. 

It  is  the  little  rift  within  the  lute 

That  by  and  by  will  make  the  music  mute, 

And,  ever  widening,  slowly  silence  all. 

This  song  is  excellent  in  its  representation  of  half-true, 
half-false  sentiment,  and  for  the  subtle  way  in  which 
the  false  sentiment  in  it  is  made  to  overtop  the  true.  It 
is  all  the  more  excellent  when  we  contrast  it  with  that 
true  rendering  of  Vivien  by  herself  in  the  song  which 
extols  the  fire  of  the  Pagan  heaven.  Merlin  detects  its 
masked  untruthfulness,  and  sets  over  against  it  the  song 
he  once  heard  sung  by  a  young  knight  in  the  early  days 
of  Arthur's  reign,  when  they  projected  the  founding  of 
the  Round  Table  for  love  of  God  and  men.  This  is  a 
lovely,  clarion-versed  passage — one  of  the  brilliantly 
invented  episodes  which  occur  in  this  Idyll : 

Far  other  was  the  song  that  once  I  heard 
By  this  huge  oak,  sung  nearly  where  we  sit : 
For  here  we  met,  some  ten  or  twelve  of  us, 
To  chase  a  creature  that  was  current  then 


Idylls  of  the  King  309 

In  these  wild  woods,  the  hart  with  golden  horns. 

It  was  the  time  when  first  the  question  rose 

About  the  founding  of  a  Table  Round, 

That  was  to  be,  for  love  of  God  and  men 

And  noble  deeds,  the  flower  of  all  the  world. 

And  each  incited  each  to  noble  deeds, 

And  while  we  waited,  one,  the  youngest  of  us, 

We  could  not  keep  him  silent,  out  he  flash'd, 

And  into  such  a  song,  such  fire  for  fame. 

Such  trumpet-blowings  in  it,  coming  down 

To  such  a  stern  and  iron-clashing  close. 

That  when  he  stopt  we  long'd  to  hurl  together, 

And  should  have  done  it  ;  but  the  beauteous  beast, 

Scared  by  the  noise  upstarted  at  our  feet, 

And  like  a  silver  shadow  slipt  away 

Thro'  the  dim  land  ;  and  all  day  long  we  rode 

Thro'  the  dim  land  against  a  rushing  wind, 

That  glorious  roundel  echoing  in  our  ears. 

And  chased  the  flashes  of  his  golden  horns 

Until  they  vanish'd  by  the  fairy  well 

That  laughs  at  iron. 

A  speech  of  Merlin's  follows,  on  true  love  and  fame, 
and  their  relation  each  to  each,  worthy  of  the  study  of  all 
men  and  women,  and  done  in  Tennyson's  weightiest  and 
fullest  manner.  The  more  excellent  it  is  in  itself,  the 
more  it  reveals  the  unnaturalness  of  the  main  conception. 
That  Merlin  should  so  speak,  and  an  hour  afterwards 
yield  as  he  yielded,  shocks  both  intelligence  and  feeling. 
But  the  speech  is  not  only  good  ;  it  is  also  personally 
interesting.  It  tells  us  Tennyson's  thoughts  about  his 
fame,  and  his  desire  to  have  his  fame  in  the  use  that  his 
poetry  may  be  to  the  world.  Merlin's  memory  of  what 
he  felt  when  he  looked  as  a  young  man  on  the  second 
star  in  the  dagger  of  Orion,  is  so  particular  a  recollection 


3IO  Tennyson 

that  I  cannot  but  imagine  that  Tennyson  is  relating  a 

story  of  himself  : 

A  single  misty  star, 
Which  is  the  second  in  a  line  of  stars 
That  seem  a  sword  beneath  a  belt  of  three — 
I  never  gazed  upon  it  but  I  dreamt 
Of  some  vast  charm  concluded  in  that  star 
To  make  fame  nothing. 

If  this  conjecture  be  true,  we  see  the  poet  in  his  youth, 

dreaming  of  fame  and  yet  controlling  his  dreams.     It  is 

Tennyson  all  over,  and  this  sober  self-control,  standing 

guard  over  fervent  imagination,  is  one  of  the  secrets  of 

his  power.     But  the  most  brilliant  of  the  episodes,  happy 

in  invention,  vivid  in  imaginative  treatment,  is  the  story 

Merlin  tells  of  his  magic  book  and  of  the  origin  of  the 

spell  by  which  he  is  finally  overcome. 

Moreover,  in  dispraising  the  drawing  of  Merlin  under 

Vivien's  temptation  we  should  not  forget  to   praise  the 

drawing   of  his    state   of  mind    at    the   beginning  ;    the 

melancholy  for  himself  and  the  world  that  fell  upon  him 

in    dark    and  dim    presentiment,    and    the  illustrations 

from  Nature  by  which  it  is  imaged.     Merlin  before  his 

vanishing,  and  in  the  prophetic  air  of  death,  sees  all  the 

woe  that  is  to  be,  all  the  fates  of  Arthur's  kingdom  : 

Then  fell  on  Merlin  a  great  melancholy  : 

He  walk'd  with  dreams  and  darkness,  and  he  found 

A  doom  that  ever  poised  itself  to  fall. 

An  ever-moaning  battle  in  the  mist, 

World-war  of  dying  flesh  against  the  life, 

Death  in  all  life  and  lying  in  all  love. 

The  meanest  having  power  upon  the  highest. 

And  the  high  purpose  broken  by  the  worm. 


Idylls  of  the  King  311 

This  is  greatly  conceived  and  felt,  and  equal  to  it  in 
poetic  power — one  of  Tennyson's  most  subtle  and  splen- 
did illustrations — is  this — 

So  dark  a  forethought  roll'd  about  his  brain 
As  on  a  dull  day  in  an  ocean  cave 
The  blind  wave  feeling  round  his  long  sea-hall 
In  silence. 

The  full  power  of  human  imagination  is  added  in  those 
lines  to  the  business  of  the  sea,  and  lifts  the  thing  into  a 
great  nobility  ;  while  in  his  next  illustration  of  the  same 
presentiment  he  describes  exactly  what  many  have  seen 
but  few  observed  : 

O  did  ye  never  lie  upon  the  shore, 
And  watch  the  curl'd  white  of  the  coming  wave 
Glass'd  in  the  slippery  sand  before  it  breaks? 
Ev'n  such  a  wave,  but  not  so  pleasurable, 
Dark  in  the  glass  of  some  presageful  mood, 
Had  I  for  three  days  seen,  ready  to  fall. 

It  remains  to  say  one  word  of  the  scenery  of  the  piece 
and  of  its  close.  We  are  in  the  wild  forest  of  Broceliande 
in  Brittany.  Great  meadows,  full  of  buttercups,  fill 
the  space  between  the  sea  and  the  huge  wood.  The 
wood  is  of  ancient  oaks  ;  in  it  there  are  glades,  and 
sweet  springs  dropping  from  the  rocky  clefts,  and  fairy 
wells  ;  and  Merlin  and  Vivien  sit  near  a  hollow  oak,  the 
same,  perhaps,  that  Heine  saw.  There  the  storm  over- 
takes them,  and  they  refuge  in  the  hollow  tree.  As  the 
lightning  leaps  and  the  thunder  peals,  Vivien  flies  into 
Merlin's  arms  and  has  her  way  : 


312  Tennyson 

And  ever  overhead 
Bellow'd  the  tempest,  and  the  rotten  branch 
Snapt  in  the  rushing  of  the  river-rain 
Above  them. 

It  is  a  habit  of  Tennyson's,  as  I  have  said  before,  to 
make  Nature  reflect  the  passions  of  man,  and  the  end  of 
Vivien  is  no  exception  to  this  common  rule. 

The  Idyll  of  Lancelot  mid  Elaine  follows  that  of 
Merlin  and  Vivien.  Woven  in  and  out  of  it  is  the  story 
of  the  development  to  which  the  love  of  Lancelot  and 
Guinevere  had  now  attained,  and  this  is  one  of  the  best 
and  most  human  pieces  of  work  in  the  Idylls.  I  will, 
however,  keep  it  for  a  more  fitting  place.  The  character 
of  Elaine  herself  and  her  story  can  be  put  with  brevity, 
and  it  is  not  difficult  to  see  why  Elaine  follows  Vivien. 

Elaine  is  set  over  against  Vivien  in  the  fullest  con- 
trast. As  the  root  of  Vivien  is  conscious  guilt,  so  the 
root  of  Elaine  is  unconscious  innocence.  As  Vivien 
has  the  boldness  of  Hate  derived  from  lust,  so  Elaine 
has  the  boldness  of  Love  derived  from  purity.  Vivien 
lives  in  the  dry,  clear  world  of  cynicism.  Not  one 
wavering  mist  of  fancy  clouds  her  cruel  eyes — not  one 
imagination  of  love  touches  her.  Elaine  lives  in  a 
world  of  dim  fantasy  and  all  the  fantasy  is  born  of  love. 
She  was  happy,  not  knowing  she  was  happy,  till  she  saw 
Sir  Lancelot.  Then  she  loved,  and  loved  for  her  death. 
She  is  the  Lady  of  Shalott  (Shalott  is  Astolat)  over 
again,  but  with  a  tender  difference  ; 


Idylls  of  the  King  313 

Out  flew  the  web  and  floated  wide, 
The  mirror  cracked  from  side  to  side, 
"  The  curse  is  come  upon  me,"  cried 
The  Lady  of  Shalott. 

Vivien  lives,   Elaine  dies — it  is  the  way  of  this  world. 

But    Elaine  begins  in  joy.     Lancelot,  riding  in  secrecy 

to  the  jousts  for   the   diamond,  comes  to  Astolat,    the 

castle  of  Elaine's  father,  and  leaves  his  shield,  since  its 

emblazonings   would  reveal  who    he  was,  behind  him. 

And  Elaine,  who    having  seen  him  once,  has  loved  him 

at   first   sight    and    for    ever,    keeps    the  shield  in  her 

chamber,  and    with   the    creative    fancy   of  a   maiden, 

weaves  histories  over  every  dint  and  scratch  made  in  it, 

conjecturing  when  and  where  : 

This  cut  is  fresh  ; 
That  ten  years  back  ;  this  dealt  him  at  Caerlyle  ; 
That  at  Caerleon  ;  this  at  Camelot  ; 
And  ah,  God's  mercy,  what  a  stroke  was  there  ! 

"  So  she  lived  in  fantasy" — and  a  beautiful  and  true 
picture  it  is  of  a  young  girl's  heart  !  If  the  dreams  of 
young  imagination,  as  Wordsworth  sings,  keep  pure  the 
heart,  the  pure  heart  of  youth  has  lovelier  imaginations 
than  any  experience  of  life  can  bring,  sweeter  and  more 
varied  fantasies  than  any  genius  that  has  sinned  and 
sorrowed.  But  they  are  always  silent.  Tennyson  has 
seen  clearly  this  beautiful  thing.  In  all  his  work  there 
is  nothing  truer  to  womanhood  than  his  picture  of  Elaine; 
and  true  to  that  moment  of  womanhood  so  difficult  to 
represent,  when  the  girl,  suddenly  touched  by  a  great 
love,  becomes   the  woman.     If  here  and  there  the  alle- 


314  Tennyson 

gorical  element  enters  into  her,  it  is  not  obtrusive,  and 
it  is  a  comfort  to  be  freed  from  it.  This  is  a  real  woman  : 
not  symbolic,  but  human.  Her  blood  is  eloquent  upon 
her  cheek  ;  she  lives  most  keenly  when  she  dies.  Her 
movements  are  thoughts,  her  thoughts  are  passions. 
Her  dead  body  speaks.     She  is  a  true  creation. 

Nor  do  I  know  anything  in  his  work  more  tender 
than  her  character,  her  love,  and  her  fate.  The  tender- 
ness of  Tennyson  is  one  of  his  remarkable  qualities — 
not  so  much  in  itself,  for  other  poets  have  been  more 
tender — but  in  combination  with  his  rough  power.  We 
are  not  surprised  that  his  rugged  strength  is  capable  of 
the  mighty  and  tragic  tenderness  of  Rizpah,  but  we  do 
not  think  at  first  that  he  could  feel  and  realise  the 
exquisite  tenderness  of  Elaine.  But,  no  :  both  are  in  his 
capacity.  It  is  a  wonderful  thing  to  have  sq  wide  a  ten- 
derness, and  only  a  great  poet  can  possess  and  use  it  well. 

Moreover,  with  the  power  of  delicate  tenderness  goes 
subtlety  of  treatment  ;  and  Elaine  was  exceedingly 
difficult  to  do  with  sufficient  fineness  of  touch.  Her 
innocent  boldness  might  well  have  become  unmaidenly. 
She  does  not  conceal  her  love  ;  she  lets  Lancelot  see  it  ; 
she  strives  to  make  him  hers  ;  finally,  she  confesses  her 
love  to  him,  she  will  be  anything  to  him — if  not  his 
wife,  to  follow  him  as  servant. 

Then  suddenly  and  passionately  she  spoke  : 

"  I  have  gone  mad.     I  love  you  ;  let  me  die." 

*'  Ah,  sister,"  answer'd  Lancelot,  "  what  is  this?" 

And  innocently  extending  her  white  arms, 

"  Your  love,"  she  said,  "  your  love — to  be  your  wife." 


Idylls  of  the  King  315 

And  Lancelot  answer'd  :     "  Had  I  chosen  to  wed 

I  had  been  wedded  earlier,  sweet  Elaine  ; 

But  now  there  never  will  be  wife  of  mine." 

"  No,  no,"  she  cried,  "  I  care  not  to  be  wife, 

But  to  be  with  you  still,  to  see  your  face, 

To  serve  you,  and  to  follow  you  thro'  the  world." 

She  rises  to  the  very  verge  of  innocent  maidenliness  in 
passionate  love,  but  she  does  not  go  over  the  verge. 
And  to  be  on  the  verge,  and  not  pass  beyond  it,  is 
the  very  peak  of  innocent  girlhood  when  seized  by 
overmastering  love.  It  was  as  difficult  to  represent 
Elaine  as  to  represent  Juliet  ;  and  Tennyson  has 
succeeded  well  where  Shakspere  has  succeeded 
beautifully.  It  is  great  praise,  but  it  is  well  de- 
served. Moreover,  had  her  love  been  commonplace, 
if  true  love  is  ever  commonplace,  she  might  have  been 
somewhat  injured  in  our  eyes.  But  the  greatness  of 
Lancelot  excuses  her.  She  loves  no  young  carpet- 
knight,  but  the  noblest  ;  gaunt  with  battles  without,  and 
his  face  marred  with  fierce  battles  within.  He  wins  her 
heart  as  Othello  won  Desdemona  by  telling  of  glorious 
wars,  and  few  battle-passages  are  finer  than  Tennyson's 
rapid  and  fierce  sketch  on  Lancelot's  lips  of  the  twelve 
great  battles,  and  finally  of  Arthur  standing  after  the  last 
fight  on  the  top  of  Mount  Badon  : 

High  on  a  heap  of  slain,  from  spur  to  plume 
Red  as  the  rising  sun  with  heathen  blood, 

I  never  saw  his  like,  there  lives 
No  greater  leader. 


3i6  Tennyson 

"  Save  your  great  self,  fair  lord,"  said  Elaine  to  her 
heart.  And  next  morning  he  rode  away,  wearing  her 
favour,  which  her  innocent  daring  asked  him  to  carry, 
and  leaving  her  his  shield.  When  she  hears  of  his 
dreadful  wound — 

Through  her  own  bide  she  felt  the  sharp  lance  go. 

It  is  a  line  of  which  Shakspere  might  be  proud.  When 
Gawain  asks  for  her  love,  she  is  not  ashamed  to  tell  him 
she  loves  Lancelot.  She  cannot  rest  at  home,  having 
heard  of  his  wound,  and  begs  her  father  to  let  her  go 
and  tend  on  Lancelot.  It  is  a  lovely  passage,  and  she 
woos  her  father  to  her  will  as  sweetly  as  a  bird  sings  ;  and 
then,  going,  she  hears  in  her  heart  : 

Being  so  very  wilful  you  must  die. 

And  her  conviction  that  she  will  die  of  her  love  excuses 
all  her  devotion  to  one  who  does  not  care  for  her. 
When  to  the  world  she  would  seem  unwomanly,  she  is 
most  womanly.  Certainty  of  death  dissolves  conven- 
tions. When  she  sees  Lancelot  she  utters 
A  little  tender  dolorous  cry  ; 

and  when  he  kisses  her  as  we  kiss  a  child,  it  is  more  to 

her  : 

At  once  she  slipt  like  water  to  the  floor  : 

And  all  her  heart's  sad  secret  blazed  itself 
In  the  heart's  colours  on  her  simple  face. 

And,  having  tended  him  into  health,  she  tells  her  love, 
and  he  offers  her  all  friendship  and  its  offices.     "  Of  all 


Idylls  of  the  King  317 

this  will  I  nothing,"  she  cries,  and,  swooning,  is  borne  to 
her  tower-room,  and  Lancelot  rides  away.  All  this  is 
beautifully,  intimately  conceived.  Nor  is  her  death  less 
graciously,  less  powerfully  wrought.  These  are  lovely 
lines  which  tell  of  her  lonely  watch  at  night  : 

Death,  like  a  friend's  voice  from  a  distant  field 
Approaching  thro'  the  darkness,  call'd  :  the  owl's 
Wailing  had  power  upon  her,  and  she  mixt 
Her  fancies  with  the  sallow-rifted  glooms 
Of  evening,  and  the  moanings  of  the  wind. 

And  the  song  that  follows,  how  simply  wrought  it  is,  and 
yet  how  subtly — with  the  subtlety  of  long  passion's 
interwoven  thought  : 

Sweet  is  true  love  tho'  given  in  vain,  in  vain  ; 
And  sweet  is  death  who  puts  an  end  to  pain  ; 
I  know  not  which  is  sweeter,  no,  not  I. 

Love,  art  thou  sweet  ?  then  bitter  death  must  be  : 
Love,  thou  art  bitter  ;  sweet  is  death  to  me. 

0  love,  if  death  be  sweeter,  let  me  die. 

Sweet  love,  that  seems  not  made  to  fade  away, 
Sweet  death,  that  seems  to  make  us  loveless  clay, 

1  know  not  which  is  sweeter,  no,  not  I. 

I  fain  would  follow  love,  if  that  could  be  ; 
I  needs  must  follow  death,  who  calls  for  me  : 
Call  and  I  follow,  I  follow  !  let  me  die. 

This  is  almost  like  a  piece  out  of  the  sonnets  of  Shak- 
spere,  full  of  his  to-and-fro  play  with  words  that  are 
thoughts  ;  with  the  same  kind  of  all-pervading  emotion 
in   the  lines  ;    the   same  truth   to   the   situation   and  the 


3i8  Tennyson 

character  of  the  singer  ;  and  with  Tennyson's  deep- 
seated  waters  of  love — which  too  rarely  come  to  the 
surface — welling  upwards  in  it.  That  which  follows  is 
almost  at  the  same  level : 

High  with  the  last  line  scaled  her  voice,  and  this, 
All  in  a  fiery  dawning  wild  with  wind 
That  shook  her  tower,  her  brothers  heard,  and  thought 
With  shuddering,  "  Ilark  the  Phantom  of  the  house 
That  ever  shrieks  before  a  death,"  and  call'd 
The  father,  and  all  three  in  hurry  and  fear 
Ran  to  her,  and  lo  !  the  blood-red  light  of  dawn 
Flared  on  her  face,  she  shrilling,  "  Let  me  die." 

Then,  out  of  that  great  passion  she  entered  into  quie- 
tude, and  set  forth  her  funeral,  becoming  in  her  memory 
a  little  child  again.  For  she  remembers  how  often  she 
wished  to  pass  the  poplar  on  the  stream,  and  might  not  ; 
but  now  she  will,  laid  in  her  boat,  pass  beyond  it,  dead, 
and  so  sail  with  her  dying  message  to  Lancelot  into  the 
very  palace  of  the  King.  Therefore,  this  being  prom- 
ised her,  and  saying  many  beautiful  things  of  trust  and 
honour,  in  innocence  and  cheerfulness  she  dies. 

A  fair  life  and  a  fair  death  !  It  is  sorrowful,  but  she 
had  her  joy.  She  loved  ;  she  loved  one  worthy  of  her 
love,  and  her  heart  made  him  worthier  still.  Of  him  she 
believed  no  wrong,  for  in  herself  there  was  no  wrong. 
Her  innocence  was  more  than  earth  could  bear,  and  it 
was  well  it  was  borne  away  to  heaven.  None  may  dare 
to  mourn  her  fate  ;  it  was  as  blest  as  the  heart  of  Love 
could  make  it.  There  are,  like  her,  rare  souls  on  earth 
so  wonderfully  fortunate  in  their  fate  that  our  troubled 


Idylls  of  the  King  319 

hearts  cannot  imagine  their  happiness  ;  and  she  was  one 
of  these.  Our  pity  is  with  Lancelot,  with  Guinevere, 
with  Arthur,  but  not  with  her. 

The  story  of  the  Holy  Grail,  the  Holy  Vessel,  traces 
its  origins  back  to  a  remote  antiquity.  The  oldest  ele- 
ments of  the  tale  were  Celtic  (chiefly  Irish),  and  their 
symbolism  was  not  Christian,  but  heathen.  Two  sets  of 
stories,  according  to  Mr.  Nutt,  were  the  starting-point  of 
the  Grail  legend.  In  the  first  set  a  kinsman  avenged  a 
blood-feud  by  means  of  three  magic  talismans — the 
sword,  the  lance,  and  the  vessel  ;  in  the  second  set  the 
hero  visits  a  castle  under  a  spell,  and  finds  all  its  in- 
dwellers  fed  by  a  magic  vessel,  and  living  by  its  means 
a  prolonged  life  ;  from  which  fortune  or  misfortune  they 
are  freed  by  the  hero  asking  a  question  about  the  vessel. 
When  these  two  tales  were  mixed  up  with  the  tale  of 
Arthur,  they  were  thrown  together  into  one  story.  The 
Grail,  the  sword,  and  the  lance  mingle  in  this  one  story 
all  the  powers  they  have  in  both  the  series  of  tales.  The 
two  castles  become  one  castle.  But  the  most  important 
amalgamating  element  (which  was  sure  to  run  both 
stories  into  one)  was  that  both  the  castles — that  to  which 
the  avenger  goes  to  find  lance  and  sword  for  his  work, 
and  that  to  which  the  hero  goes  to  set  free  from  the  spell 
those  who  are  kept  immortal  by  the  vessel — are  both 
symbols  in  the  original  Celtic  tales  of  one  and  the  same 
thing — of  the  other  world,  the  fairy-land  of  eternal 
youth.      How  this  single  story  came  to  be  Christianised 


320  Tennyson 

is  a  question  which  still  remains  under  debate.  But  it 
is  plain  that  when  it  became  Christian  in  Britain  it  had 
a  local  habitation.  It  had  housed  itself  in  Glastonbury, 
where  possibly  under  Welsh  rule  a  small  heathen  temple 
dedicated  to  Bran  was  transformed  into  a  Christian 
church.  Bran  in  Celtic  mythology  was  the  ruler  of  the 
Other  World  and  would  have  in  his  charge  these  talis- 
mans :  the  sword,  the  lance,  and  the  cup.  When  the 
temple  became  the  church,  Bran  was  turned  into  a  saint, 
and  his  magic  gear  naturally  takes  a  Christian  meaning  ; 
and  the  first  notion  of  the  cup  and  the  lance  as  con- 
nected with  Jesus,  the  feeder  of  His  people,  whose  blood 
saved  them,  and  whose  side  was  pierced  by  the  lance, 
would  then  arise.  That  is,  the  characteristics  of  Bran 
the  heathen  god  of  the  far-off  world  of  eternal  youth, 
and  the  gear  that  he  possessed,  were  transferred  to 
Jesus,  and  fitted  to  the  story  of  the  Gospel. 

Then  an  addition  to  this,  and  a  modification,  were 
made  from  the  legend  of  Joseph  of  Arimathea  in  the 
Gospel  of  Nicodemus,  a  gospel  which  had  a  great  vogue 
in  England  in  early  English  times.  A  fuller  Christian 
import  was  given  to  the  Grail  from  the  story  of  Jesus  in 
that  gospel.  The  Grail  is  now  the  dish  used  at  the  Last 
Supper,  and  that  with  which  Joseph  caught  the  last  drop 
of  blood  which  fell  from  the  side  or  the  feet  of  Christ. 
Joseph,  thrown  into  prison,  is  supernaturally  fed  from 
this  sacred  vessel  for  forty-two  years. 

The  next  step  is  when  a  British  legend  brings  Joseph 
to    Britain,  and  the    Grail  is  laid    up  at    Glastonbury. 


Idylls  of  the  King  321 

Joseph  takes  the  place  now  of  Bran.  After  his  death, 
the  Grail  is  hidden  from  men,  until  the  destined  knight 
appears  who  is  to  achieve  its  Quest.  Then  its  meaning 
further  developed.  It  became  the  symbol  of  the  might- 
iest miracle  of  the  Roman  Church,  of  the  change  of  the 
body  and  blood  of  Jesus  into  the  substance  of  the  bread 
and  wine.  Thence  arose  the  great  and  fruitful  concep- 
tion of  the  search  for  the  Holy  Grail  as  the  search  for 
absolute  union  with  Christ.  A  few,  now  and  again, 
behold  it.  It  seems  a  crystal  cup  with  rose-red  beatings 
as  of  a  heart  in  it,  and  with  it  is  often  a  platter  on  which 
bread  lies,  into  which  bread  a  white  child  smites  himself. 
It  holds  then  the  body  and  blood  of  God.  When  the 
knights  of  Arthur  see  it  in  the  hall,  it  appears  covered  ; 
thunderings  and  lightnings  attend  it,  and  the  roofs  rack 
and  rive  as  it  passes  by.  The  heroes  leap  to  their  feet, 
and  swear  that  for  a  year  and  a  day  they  will  take  up 
the  Quest  to  see  it  uncovered.  This  is  only  one  form  of 
the  manifold  tales  of  this  Holy  Quest.  A  hundred  poets 
took  it  up,  and  wove  round  it  the  romantic  adventures 
of  a  hundred  knights.  The  people  loved  it  for  its  adven- 
tures ;  the  Church  loved  it,  for  it  brought,  by  means  of 
the  tale,  all  the  poetic  enjoyment  of  the  people  into  close 
contact  with  the  central  doctrine  of  the  Church  of 
Rome. 

There  is  one  more  thing  to  say.  Before  the  Grail 
embodied  the  full  sacramental  meaning  it  had,  while  it 
was  yet  half  heathen  and  half  Christian,  Percivale  is  the 
hero  of  the  Quest ;  but  when  the  notion  of  absolute  chas- 


32  2  Tennyson 

tity,  of  total  division  from  women  as  the  necessity  for 
perfect  union  with  Christ,  spread  far  and  wide,  Percivale 
was  not  pure  enough  to  achieve  the  Quest,  and  Galahad, 
the  virgin  in  body  and  soul,  was  invented.  A  new  series 
of  tales  having  Galahad  as  hero,  and  glorifying  virginity, 
now  arose.  To  this  there  was  one  exception.  When 
the  story  of  the  Grail  was  used  by  Wolfram  von  Eschen- 
bach  in  Germany,  we  find  Percivale  in  his  pre-eminent 
position  ;  and  Tennyson,  in  this  Idyll,  reverts  as  it  were 
unconsciously  to  the  original  importance  of  Percivale.* 
It  is  Percivale  that  tells  the  story — we  see  Galahad 
through  his  eyes.  Nevertheless  it  is  the  virgin  Galahad 
alone  who  jn  the  Idylls  fully  wins  the  Quest,  who  not 
only  alwaj^s  sees  the  Grail,  but  finally  goes  with  it  to 
that  spiritual  city  which  is  the  Christian  representative 
of  the  Welsh  Avalon,  and  also  of  the  Irish  Tir-na-nogue, 
the  land  of  undying  youth. 

So  far  Tennyson  clings  to  the  ecclesiastical  form  of 
the  tale.  But  though  he  accepted  the  virginity  of  Gala- 
had as  necessary  for  the  achieving  of  the  Quest,  the 
spirit  of  his  poem  is  whole  leagues  away  from  the  ideal 

*  This  is  a  remark  of  Mr.  Nutt  in  his  delightful  book  on  The 
Holy  Grail.  I  have  followed  his  explanation  of  the  development 
of  the  Grail  story— an  explanation  largely,  it  should  be  noted,  hypo- 
thetical, owing  to  the  nature  of  the  evidence  upon  which  the  student 
must  rely.  This  caution  applies  with  especial  force  to  that  portion  of 
the  hypothesis  which  assumes  the  conversion  of  a  heathen  Bran  into 
the  Christian  Bron.  It  may  be  added,  however,  that  although  con- 
siderable research  has  been  bestowed  upon  the  Grail  legend  since  the 
appearance  of  Mr.  Nutt's  book  (1888),  no  alternative  hypothesis  has 
been  propounded  that  has  won  the  acceptance  of  scholars. 


Idylls  of  the   King  323 

of  the  Galahad-romances  which  glorified  a  life  of  com- 
plete spiritual  asceticism,  and  which,  conceiving  that 
woman  was  the  great  plague  and  evil  matter  of  the  world, 
made  this  hero  reject,  as  deadly  to  spiritual  perfection, 
human  love  and  marriage. 

That  was  not  the  ideal  of  Wolfram  in  the  Parsifal. 
Parsifal  in  Wolfram's  poem  is  the  ideal  king  who  marries 
the  woman  he  loves  and  completes  his  life  in  her,  whose 
work  is  to  stay  in  the  world,  and  to  make  it  better  by 
noble  government.  Tennyson  takes  this  line  in  the 
Idylls^  but  he  is  plainer  than  Wolfram,  for  Wolfram  only 
lets  us  infer  his  view.  Tennyson  deliberately  sets  him- 
self to  make  an  allegory,  the  meaning  of  which  shall  be — 
That  ascetic  religion,  an  exciting  pursuit  of  signs  and 
wonders,  severance  from  home  and  from  the  common 
love  of  man  and  woman,  and  a  retreat  from  the  daily 
work  of  the  world  into  cloistered  seclusion  or  in  pursuit 
of  a  supernatural  spiritualism,  are,  save  for  a  few  ex- 
ceptional characters,  entirely  evil.  These  things  dissolve 
societies,  injure  human  life,  and  produce  the  very  evils 
they  are  invented  to  overcome.  The  opposite  life  to 
that,  the  life  of  Arthur,  is  the  right  life. 

In  this  modern  rej^making  of  the  legend  of  the  Holy 
Grail  the  symbolism  of  the  story  is  wheeled  right  round 
by  Tennyson.  The  search  for  the  Holy  Grail  is  a  mis; 
take  ;  an  evil,  not  a  good.  The  true  life  is  to  bring 
heaven  to  earth  for  others  ;  the  untrue,  to  seek,  apart 
from  earth,  a  heaven  for  one's  self.  Nevertheless,  like 
the  wisest  poets  who  are  not  intolerant  of  all  theories  of 


324  Tennyson 

life  but  their  own,  nor  ignorant  of  the  variousness  of 
man,  Tennyson  allows  that  there  may  be  a  few  for  whom 
this  virgin,  ascetic,  spiritual  life  is  fitted,  and  who  per- 
form, in  that  life,  their  own  special  work  of  representing 
before  mankind  the  ideal  Holiness,  the  immortal  quest 
of  perfection.  And  he  chooses  to  put  this  point  in  the 
persons  of  Percivale's  sister  and  Sir  Galahad.* 

Percivale's  sister  is  admirably  drawn,  all  the  main 
characteristics  of  the  mystic  female  saint,  like  Catherine 
of  Siena,  are  embodied  in  her  ;  and  the  picture  is  made 
by  scattered  touches  given  with  apparent  lightness 
through  the  story.  She  was  no  cold-hearted  maid.  The 
type  of  which  she  is  the  image  has  a  passionate  temper- 
ament : 

*  I  think  there  is  more  in  it  than  this.  The  image  of  the  stainless 
knight,  wholly  apart  from  sex  and  appetite,  divided  from  the  ma- 
terial interests  of  the  world,  a  pure  spirit  clothed  for  a  time  in 
flesh,  but  the  flesh  so  refined  by  the  spirit  that  it  becomes  archangelic 
matter,  a  terrible  crystal  of  pure  love,  moving  in  the  supernat- 
ural world,  with  all  its  powers  round  him,  while  yet  on  earth — this 
image,  independent  altogether  of  ascetic  theology,  was  one  of  the 
finest  "motives  "  art  could  have  ;  and  its  artistic  elements  were  a 
great  part  of  the  reason  why  it  entered  the  heart  of  the  world  and 
lodged  there.  Wolfram's  Parsifa' drops  to  a  lower  level  of  art  be- 
cause he  did  not  use  this ' '  motive. "  When  Wagner  imagined  the  Par- 
sifal, he  felt  an  artist's  need  of  this  motive,  and  he  restored  this 
other-world  purity  to  Pcrcivale.  When  Tennyson  took  up  the  story, 
he  preserved  this  virgi.:,  spotless  ideal  of  Galahad,  even  though  his 
view  of  human  lifj  and  duty  was  opposed  to  the  ascetic  life  connected 
with  it.  He  could  not  miss  the  dazzling  ideal  of  Galahad  as  an 
art-subject.  The  artist,  as  it  were  against  the  man's  will,  was 
stronger  in  him  than  tlie  social  moralist.  Galahad  remains  Galahad. 
Tennyson  even  adds  another  image  of  the  same  conception  in  a 
woman,  in  the  sister  of  Percivale. 


Idylls  of  the  King  325 

A  holy  maid — tho'  never  maiden  glow'd, 
But  that  was  in  her  earlier  maidenhood, 
With  such  a  fervent  flame  of  human  love. 

This  passion,  rudely  blunted,  turned  to  an  ardent 
longing  for  union  with  Christ.  In  that  longing  all  that 
was  earthly  in  her  wasted  away,  till  in  her  eyes  alone 
shone  fire,  the  spiritual  fire  of  holiness  that  had  power  to 
awaken  in  others  the  same  desire  : 

And  so  she  pray'd  and  fasted,  till  the  sun 

Shone,  and    the   wind  blew,  thro'  her,  and  I  thought 

She  might  have  risen  and  floated  when  I  saw  her. 

At  last  she  sees  the  vision,  and  she  sees  it  through  her 
own  high-wrought  and  delicate  passion.  It  comes,  at- 
tended by  such  music  as  an  ethereal  ear  might  hear — as 
of  a  silver  horn  far  off,  blown  o'er  the  hills,  a  slender 
sound,  unlike  all  earthly  music.  And  when  the  Grail 
streams  through  the  cell,  the  beam  down  which  it  steals 
is  silver-cold,  as  the  maiden  heart  that  sees  it  ;  but  the 
Grail  is  rose-red  ;  in  it  are  rosy  beatings  as  of  a  living 
heart,  and  the  white  walls  of  the  cell  are  dyed  with  rosy 
colours.  Cold  to  earth,  ecstatic  to  heaven  ;  it  is  the  very 
vision  of  a  mystic  maiden's  passionate  purity.  And  the 
verses  are  fitted  to  the  vision.  Then,  recognising  a  kin- 
dred soul  in  Galahad,  she  weaves  a  belt  for  him  out  of 
her  hair,  and  speaks  to  him  in  the  language  of  earthly 
love,  yet  there  is  no  earth  in  it. 

"  My  knight,  my  love,  my  knight  of  heaven, 
Othou,  my  love,  whose  love  is  one  with  mine, 
I,  maiden,  round  thee,  maiden,  bind  my  belt. 


o 


26  Tennyson 


Go  forth,  for  thou  shall  see  what  I  have  seen, 
And  break  thro'  all,  till  one  will  crown  thee  king 
Far  in  the  spiritual  city  :  "  and,  as  she  spake, 
She  sent  the  deathless  passion  in  her  eyes 
Thro'  him,  and  made  him  hers,  and  laid  her  mind 
On  him,  and  he  believed  in  her  belief. 

From  point  to  point,  tlie  representation  embodies  the 
whole  type,  gathering  together  into  one  personality 
many  characteristics  of  separate  enthusiasts. 

Galahad  is  different.  He  sees  the  same  glory,  but  he 
does  not  retire  from  the  world,  save  in  spirit.  He  is 
still  the  warrior.  He  has  courage  to  sit  in  the  "  Perilous 
Seat,"  in  which  whosoever  sits,  loses  himself.  Merlin 
was  lost  in  it,  seating  himself  in  it  inadvertently.  But 
Oalahad,  claiming  loss  of  self  as  salvation — and  the 
whole  passage  with  Tennyson's  spiritual  meaning  in  it 
is  his  own  invention — sits  in  it  of  set  purpose,  crying,  "  If 
I  lose  myself,  I  find  myself,"  and  sees  the  Holy  Grail. 
After  that,  day  by  day,  the  thing  is  always  with  him  : 

*'  Fainter  by  day,  but  always  in  the  night 
Blood-red,  and  sliding  down  the  blacken'd  marsh 
Blood-red,  and  on  the  naked  mountain-top 
Blood-red,  and  in  the  sleeping  mere  below 
Blood-red." 

But  it  companies  with  him,  not  to  send  him  to  the 
cloister,  but  to  war.     **  I  rode,"  he  cries, 

"  Shattering  all  evil  customs  everywhere, 
And  past  thro'  Pagan  realms  and  made  them  mine, 
And  clashed  thro'  Pagan  hordes  and  bore  them  down, 
And  broke  thro'  all,  and  in  the  strength  of  this 
Came  victor." 


Idylls  of  the  King  327 

His  hour  has  now  come  to  be  crowned  in  the  spiritual 
city,  and  he  bids  Percivale  go  with  him,  and  see  his 
departure.  In  conception,  in  invention,  in  description 
of  invented  landscape,  and  in  artistic  work,  this  passing 
of  Galahad  is  splendidly  written.  It  is  too  long  to 
quote  in  full,  too  knit  together  to  be  spoiled  by  extracts, 
and  too  poetic  to  criticise.     It  is  its  own  best  criticism.* 

This  great  and  lofty  vision  of  the  glory  of  the  pure 
spiritual  life,  refined  and  thrilled  by  heavenly  holiness 
into  full  union  with  the  world  beyond  the  sense,  and  need- 
ing no  death  to  enter  into  the  perfect  life,  is  done  as  no  one 
has  done  this  kind  of  work  since  Dante.  It  is  made  all  the 
more  vivid,  and  its  unfitness  for  the  common  toil  of  good- 
ness on  this  earth  is  shown,  by  the  contrast  which  Tenny- 
son immediately  makes  to  it  in  the  daily  life  of  the  poor 
monk  Ambrosius,  who  knows  nought  of  marvels,  but  is 
the  providence  of  the  little  village  near  which  he  lives  ; 
who  does  not  understand  these  unearthly  visions,   but 

*  This  beginning  I  may  quote.  Whoever  has  seen,  wliile  involved 
in  it,  a  fierce  thunderstorm  on  a  mountain-top,  and  the  pine-forests 
below  smitten  by  the  quick-gleaming  bolt,  will  know  with  what  extra- 
ordinary truth  and  force  Tennyson  has  made  it. 

There  rose  a  hill  that  none  but  man  could  climb, 
Scarr'd  with  a  hundred  wintry  watercourses — 
Storm  at  the  top,  and  when  we  gain'd  it,  storm 
Round  us  and  death  ;  for  every  moment  glanced 
His  silver  arms  and  gloom'd :  so  quick  and  thick 
The  lightnings  here  and  there  to  left  and  right 
Struck,  till  the  dry  old  trunks  about  us,  dead, 
Yea,  rotten  with  a  hundred  years  of  death. 
Sprang  into  fire. 


328  Tennyson 

who  pities  the  men  who,  having  known  the  sweetness  of 
love,  surrender  it  for  dreams.  His  head  swims  when  he 
reads  of  ecstasies  and  dreams,  and  then  **  I  go  forth," 
he  says,  "  and  pass 

Down  to  the  little  thorpe  that  lies  so  close, 

And  almost  plaster'd  like  a  martin's  nest 

To  these  old  walls — and  mingle  with  our  folk  ;  " 

And  the  delightful  description,  which  follows  these  lines, 
of  the  work  of  this  small,  comfortable  and  comforting 
village  priest  shows  not  only  how  Tennyson  liked  this 
type,  but  also  marks  the  range  of  a  poet  who  could,  as 
it  were  in  one  breath,  write  the  sublime  passing  of  Gala- 
had and,  immediately  after,  this  homely,  loving  sketch 
of  a  small  monk's  life  in  a  small  world. 

These  then,  Percivale's  sister  and  Galahad,  were  the 
two,  woman  and  man,  who  might  attain  the  vision  of  the 
perfect  love  through  utter  separation  from  the  flesh — 
that  is,  in  the  Christian  idea,  through  loss  of  self.  But, 
in  attaining  it,  they  were  ravished  from  earth  and  the 
work  of  earth.  All  men  and  women  were  as  phantoms 
to  them.  They  left  behind  them  the  impression  of  ex- 
celling purity,  and  that  was  good  ;  but  it  was  purity 
severed  from  humanity,  and  that  was  not  good. 

But  as  to  the  rest  of  the  knights,  who  made  their  vow 
to  see  the  vision  of  the  Grail,  the  greater  number  failed 
to  see,  but  did  not  fail  to  be  useless.  They  "  followed 
wandering  fires,"  lost  themselves,  and  were  lost  to  men. 
A  few  saw  something,  but  not  the  whole.     The  vision 


Idylls  of  the  King  329 

comes  to  each  according  to  the  soul  of  each.  Lancelot, 
who  has  made  the  vow  to  seek  the  vision  of  pure  holi- 
ness and  love,  while  his  heart  loves  his  sin,  sees  the 
Grail  covered,  but  sees  it  as  holy  wrath  and  fire,  as  swift 
and  stern  condemnation.  That  which  is  sweet  and 
gentle  to  Galahad — the  light  of  which  is  soft  rose,  and 
the  colour  and  the  music  of  which  is  as  of  a  silver  horn 
among  far  hills  to  the  sister  of  Percivale — is  to  Lancelot 
a  stormy  glare,  a  heat 

As  from  a  seventimes-heated  furnace, 

from  which  he  swoons,  blasted,  and  burnt,  and  blinded. 
We  hear  how  the  others  fared,  according  to  their  character. 
But  however  the  vision  came  or  did  not  come,  the  pursuit 
of  it,  as  Tennyson  thought,  was  the  ruin  of  noble  associa- 
tion for  just  government,  the  contradiction  and  not  the 
realisation  of  true  religion.  It  breaks  up  the  Round 
Table.  The  kingdom  is  left  without  its  defenders,  and 
when  the  remnant  return  they  are  exhausted.  Their  fail- 
ure to  reach  ideal  goodness  has  made  them  reckless,  and 
drives  them  into  base  materialism.  That  which  was 
left  of  truth  and  purity  in  the  court  lessens  day  by  day. 
Sensuality,  in  swift  reaction  from  asceticism,  has  full 
sway,  and  the  fall  is  rapid.  But  where  then,  Tennyson 
asks,  is  spirituality  to  be  found,  where  pure  holiness, 
and  love  which  beholds  the  invisible  kingdom  ?  It  is 
to  be  found  where  Arthur  found  it,  in  the  midst  of 
human  life,  in  honest  love  of  men,  in  doing  our  duty 
where  God  has  placed  us. 


330  Tennyson 

Arthur,  who  represents  this  view  of  Tennyson,  has, 
he  says,  his  own  visions.  He  has  more.  He  sees  God, 
not  as  a  vision,  but  face  to  face.  He  does  not  wander 
on  the  quest  of  the  Holy  Grail,  but  He  whose  sacrifice 
of  love  the  Holy  Grail  embodied  is  always  with  him. 
So  says  the  King,  and  Percivale,  less  spiritual  in  his 
ascetic  solitude  than  Arthur,  does  not  "  know  all  he 
meant."  For,  and  I  quote  the  passage,  it  is  Tennyson's 
summing  up  of  all  the  Idyll  and  its  allegory  : 

"  Some  among  you  held,  that  if  the  King 
Had  seen  the  sight  he  would  have  sworn  the  vow  ; 
Not  easily,  seeing  that  the  King  must  guard 
That  which  he  rules,  and  is  but  as  the  hind 
To  whom  a  space  of  land  is  given  to  plow. 
Who  may  not  wander  from  the  allotted  field 
Before  his  work  be  done  ;  but,  being  done, 
Let  visions  of  the  night  or  of  the  day 
Come,  as  they  will ;  and  many  a  time  they  come, 
Until  this  earth  he  walks  on  seems  not  earth. 

In  moments  when  he  feels  he  cannot  die 
And  knows  himself  no  vision  to  himself, 
Nor  the  high  God  a  vision,  nor  that  One 
Who  rose  again  :  ye  have  seen  what  ye  have  seen." 

So  spake  the  King  ;  I  knew  not  all  he  meant. 

I  turn  now  to  the  literary  quality  of  this  poem.  I 
have  written  at  large  concerning  its  allegory,  because 
this  Idyll,  unlike  the  rest,  is  pure  allegory.  It  does  not 
come  under  the  objection  I  have  made  to  the  others  in 
which  the  allegory  and  the  story  are  mixed  together  to 
the  troubling  of  both.      In  tliis  Idyll  the  story  is  Tenny- 


Idylls  of  the  King  331 

son's  own  ;  he  has  invented  it  for  the  sake  of  his  alle- 
gory. The  form  then  is  excellent,  and  the  excellence  of 
the  form  has  acted  throughout  upon  the  minor  inven- 
tions within  the  main  invention,  on  the  verse,  the  meta- 
phors, and  the  details.  It  is  good  from  beginning  to 
end  ;  and  the  most  unexceptional  piece  of  work  that 
Tennyson  has  done  in  the  Idylls.  Criticism  has  nothing 
to  object  to  ;   it  is  lost  in  admiration  and  respect. 

The  framework  of  the  tale  could  not  be  better  con- 
ceived. Sir  Percivale  who  has  known  the  great  world 
tells  the  story  to  Ambrosius,  a  simple  brother  of  the 
monastery  who  knows  nothing  but  his  village.  This 
invention  enables  Tennyson  constantly  to  contrast  the 
exalted  with  the  simple  type  of  mind,  the  earth-loving 
with  the  heaven-loving  soul.  Again  we  hear  in  the 
remarks  of  Ambrosius  the  same  views  as  those  which 
Arthur  held  concerning  the  Quest,  given,  not  in  the 
hjgh^words  of  the  King,  but  in  the  simple  thoughts  of 
the  uneducated  monk  who  loved  the  daily  life  of  men. 
This  was  a  happy  thought  of  the  artist.  It  leads  up  to 
and  doubles  the  force  of  Arthur's  view  of  the  matter — 
that  is,  of  Tennyson's  decision  of  the  whole  question. 

An  inner  unity  is  also  given  to  the  story  and  to  its 
various  episodes,  which  otherwise  would  be  too  uncon- 
nected, by  their  being  knit  up  into  the  one  tale  of  Per- 
civale. We  never  lose  the  image  of  the  quiet,  war-worn 
knight,  sitting  with  Ambrosius  in  the  cloister.  Even  the 
unity  of  place  is  thus  preserved.  The  great  adventures 
and  the    great    adventurers,   the    city   of   Camelot,    the 


332  Tennyson 

])ictured  hall  and  the  fierce  vision  of  the  Grail  that  went 
through  it,  the  ride  of  Percivale,  the  passing  of  Gala- 
had, the  wild  voyage  of  Lancelot,  are  all  brought  into 
the  still  enclosure  where  the  two  peaceful  figures  sit  in 
the  sun.     There, 

Beneath  a  world-old  yew-tree,  darkening  half 
The  cloisters,  on  a  gustful  April  morn 
That  puff'd  the  swaying  branches  into  smoke* 
Above  them,  ere  the  summer  when  he  died, 
The  monk  Ambrosius  question'd  Percivale. 

Then,  step  by  step,  every  episode  in  order,  each  illus- 
trating one  another,  each  in  its  right  place  to  advance 
and  clinch  the  conclusion,  the  story,  or  rather  the  alle- 
gory in  the  story,  flows  on  with  such  ease  and  simplicity, 
that  it  seems  to  grow  like  a  tree  by  its  own  divine 
vitality.  And  each  episode  has  the  quality,  character, 
and  power  of  its  chief  personage  stamped  upon  it  and 
ruling  its  manner  of  representation,  its  invention,  its 
wording,  and  even  its  rhythm. 

I  have  quoted  enough  from  the  story  of  Percivale's 
sister  and  Sir  Galahad  to  prove  the  splendour  of  the 
invention.  Even  when  the  story  is  not  quite  new,  as  in 
the    case    of    Lancelot's    voyage    to    Carbonek,  it  is  so 

*  The  stamen-bearing  flowers  of  the  yew  are  covered  with  an 
abundant  yellow  pollen,  which  the  wind  disperses.  Each  flower 
sends  up  its  little  puff  of  sulphur-coloured  smoke.  Thus  the  pistil- 
bearing  flowers  which,  like  small  acorns,  grow  apart  from  the  stamen- 
bearing  ones,  receive  the  pollen.  This  smoking  of  the  yew,  which 
belongs  more  to  March  than  April,  seized  on  Tennyson's  observing 
fancy.  He  added  a  stanza  to  In  Memoriam  in  order  to  use  it  in  the 
poem,     [xxxix.] 


Idylls  of  the  King  ^^^ 

entirely  recast  that  it  becomes  a  fresh  pleasure — recast, 
not  only  for  the  sake  of  the  allegory,  but  also  for  the  joy 
that  Tennyson,  like  a  child,  felt  in  the  making  of  high 
romance.  I  illustrate  this  by  three  things  in  the  poem. 
The  first  of  these  is  Percivale's  story  of  his  setting  forth 
upon  the  Quest.  Tennyson's  object  is  to  show  that 
pride  in  one's  self,  and  its  extreme  opposite — despair  of 
sin,  which  throws  us  back  on  self — alike  render  the 
life  of  exalted  holiness  impossible,  because  for  that  we 
must,  like  Galahad,  lose  self  altogether. 

Percivale  starts  full  of  joy  in  his  own  bravery,  but  as 
he  goes,  Arthur's  warning  that  his  knights  in  this  Quest 
are  following  wandering  fires  occurs  to  him,  and  he  drops 
down  into  despair.  Then  he  sees  a  series  of  visions. 
A  burning  thirst  consumes  him  ;  it  is  the  symbol  of  the 
thirst  for  union  with  God.  "  And  on  I  rode,"  he  cries, 
and  I  quote  this  especially  for  its  accurate  description 
of  Nature — 

"  And  when  I  thought  my  thirst 
Would  slay  me,  saw  deep  lawns,  and  then  a  brook, 
With  one  sharp  rapid,  where  the  crisping  white 
Play'd ever  back  upon  the  sloping  wave. 
And  took  both  ear  and  eye  ;  and  o'er  the  brook 
Were  apple-trees,  and  apples  by  the  brook 
Fallen,  and  on  the  lawns." 

And  while  he  drank  the  brook  and  ate  the  apples,  all 
fell  into  dust,  and  he  was  left  alone,  thirsting  still,  and 
in  a  land  of  sand  and  thorns.  It  is  the  symbol  of  the 
thirsty  soul  trying  to  find  in  the  beauty  of  Nature  its 
true  home,   and  failing.     Then  he  sees    a  woman  spin- 


334  Tennyson 

ning  at  the  door  of  a  fair  home,  and  she  cries  "  Rest  here," 
but  she  and  the  house  fall  also  into  dust.  It  is  the 
symbol  of  the  soul  trying  to  find  rest  in  domestic  love, 
and  failing. 

Then  he  sees  a  yellow  gleam  flash  along  the  world,  and 
the  plowman  and  the  milkmaid  fall  before  it  ;  but  One, 
in  golden  armour,  splendid  as  the  sun  and  crowned, 
comes  along — and  he  too,  touched,  falls  into  dust.  It  is 
the  symbol  of  the  soul  seeking  to  be  satisfied  with  the 
glory  of  the  earth,  chiefly  to  be  attained  in  war.  Then 
he  finds  a  city  on  a  hill,  walled,  and  a  great  crowd  that 
welcomes  him  and  calls  him  mightiest  and  purest  ;  but 
when  he  comes  near,  the  city  is  a  ruined  heap,  and  the 
crowd  is  gone.  It  is  the  symbol  of  the  soul  seeking  to 
slake  its  thirst  by  popular  applause,  and  especially  in 
the  fame  of  a  ruler  of  men,  but  all  is  thirst  and  desola- 
tion as  before  ;  and  then  he  finds  the  valley  of  humility 
and  of  forgetfulness  of  his  sins  in  the  glory  of  God's 
love.     It  is  a  rich  invention,  and  perfectly  wrought. 

The  next  illustration  of  this  brilliant  inventiveness  is 
the  description  of  the  city  of  Camelot  and  of  the  hall  of 
Arthur,  and  of  the  streets  of  the  mediaeval  town  when 
the  knights  depart  on  the  Quest.  The  towers,  the  roofs, 
the  ornaments  of  the  town,  the  sculpture  in  the  hall, 
the  great  statue  of  gold  with  its  peaked  wings  pointing 
to  the  northern  star,  the  glass  of  the  twelve  windows 
emblazoned  with  Arthur's  wars,  are  all  described  as  if 
the  poet  had  seen  them  face  to  face,  and  with  a  richness 
which  truly    represents  the    gorgeous    architecture  and 


Idylls  of  the  King  335 

furniture  of  the  old  romances.     Tennyson  has  absorbed 

and    then   re-created  all  he  has   read   in  them.     I  can 

scarcely  praise  this  work  too  highly. 

Lastly,  there  is  the  story  of  Lancelot's  half-vision  of  the 

Holy  Grail  and  his  drift  over  the  sea  to  the  enchanted 

rock  of  Carbonek.     Its  basis  is    to  be  found  in  the  old 

tale  ;  but  whoever  reads  it  in  Malory's  Morte  (T Arthur 

will  see  now    imaginatively  it  has    been    re-conceived. 

It  is  full  of  the  true  romantic  element  ;  it  is  close  to  the 

essence  of  the  story  of  the  Holy  Grail  ;  there  is  nothing 

in  all  the  Idylls  more  beautiful  in  vision   and  in  sound  ; 

and  the  art  with  which  it  is  worked  is  as  finished  as  the 

conception   is   majestic.     I   will    praise  it   no  more,  but 

quote  a  part  of   it.     To    hear   it    is    its  highest  praise. 

Lancelot,  torn    between   his   horror  of  his    sin  and  his 

love  of  it,  seeking  the  Grail  that  he  might  be  free  from 

his  sin,  yet  knowing  that  he  does  not  wish  to  be  freed,  is 

driven  into  a  madness  by  the  inward  battle,  "  whipt  into 

waste  fields   far  away,"  and  beaten  down    to    earth  by 

little  folk,  mean  knights — and  then  "  I  came,"  he  cries  : 

"  All  in  my  folly  to  tho  naked  shore, 

Wide  flats,  where  nothing  but  coarse  grasses  grew  ; 

But  such  a  blast,  my  King,  began  to  blow, 

So  loud  a  blast  along  the  shore  and  sea. 

Ye  could  not  hear  the  waters  for  the  blast, 

Tho'  heapt  in  mounds  and  ridges  all  the  sea 

Drove  like  a  cataract,  and  all  the  sand 

Swept  like  a  river,  and  the  clouded  heavens 

Were  shaken  with,  the  motion  and  the  sound." 

He  finds  a  boat,  black  in  the  sea-foam,  and  drives  in 
it  seven  days  over  the  deep  till  it  shocks  on  the  castled 


^2,(>  Tennyson 

rock  of  Carbonek  whose   "  charm-like   portals  open  to 
the  sea."     Then  climbing  the  steps  he  passes  the  lions — 

"  And  up  into  the  sounding  hall  I  past  ; 

But  nothing  in  the  sounding  hall  I  saw, 

No  bench  nor  table,  painting  on  the  wall 

Or  shield  of  knight  ;  only  the  rounded  moon 

Thro'  the  tall  oriel  on  the  rolling  sea. 

But  always  in  the  quiet  house  I  heard 

Clear  as  a  lark,  high  o'er  me  as  a  lark, 

A  sweet  voice  singing  in  the  topmost  tower 

To  the  eastward  :  up  I  climb'd  a  thousand  steps 

With  pain  :  as  in  a  dream  I  seem'd  to  climb 

For  ever  :  at  the  last  I  reach'd  a  door, 

A  light  was  in  the  crannies,  and  I  heard, 

'  Glory  and  joy  and  honour  to  our  Lord 

And  to  the  Holy  Vessel  of  the  Grail.'  " 

Lancelot  was  not  only  the  greatest  knight ;  he  proves 
here  that  he  was  the  greatest  singer. 

The  story  of  Pelleas  atid  Ettarre  as  told  in  Malory's 
book  is  natural,  simple,  and  common.  The  ground  of  the 
trouble  in  the  tale  is  also  simijle.  It  is  the  boredom  of 
Ettarre.  She  is  wearied  of  being  loved  by  Pelleas,  for 
whom  she  feels  no  love.  "  I  have  no  peace  from  him,"  she 
cries.  A  woman  in  such  circumstances  is  naturally  cruel. 
These  are  simple  lines  on  which  to  move  a  tale  ;  and  the 
Pelleas  of  Malory  is  quite  an  ordinary  person  and  his 
Ettarre  not  an  uncommon  character  of  the  Romances. 
The  love-tale  also  has  nothing  out  of  the  common,  but 
it  is  interesting  ;  it  has  the  romantic  air,  and  it  goes  up 
and  down  between  pain  and  pleasure  in  an  adventurous 
fashion,  of  which  it  is  agreeable  to  read  in  a  quiet  hour. 


Idylls  of  the  King  337 

I  need  not  tell  Malory's  tale,  for  the  things  that  happen 
are  much  the  same  as  in  Tennyson's  Idyll,  at  least  as 
far  as  that  place  in  the  tale  where  Pelleas  leaves  Ettarre 
and  rides  away.  At  that  point,  Tennyson  re-casts  the 
story.  Pelleas,  in  Malory's  book,  departs  furious  with 
the  treachery  of  Gawain,  and  equally  furious  with 
Ettarre,  not  for  her  unchastity,  but  because  she  has 
loved  another  than  himself.  Tortured  by  these  two 
angers,  he  takes  to  his  bed  to  die  of  rage  and  disappoint- 
ment. He  is  then  found  by  a  Lady  of  the  Lake  who 
has  pity  on  him,  cures  his  sickness,  replaces  his  love  of 
Ettarre  by  love  of  herself  ;  and  in  order  to  avenge  Pel- 
leas on  Ettarre,  bewitches  Ettarre  into  a  hopeless  love 
of  Pelleas,  Ettarre,  drawn  to  his  bedside,  besought  for 
the  affection  she  had  rejected.  Pelleas  cried  out, 
"  Begone,  traitress  !  "  and  Ettarre  died  of  that  sorrow. 
Then  Pelleas  went  away  gaily  with  the  Lady  of  the 
Lake. 

There  is  no  moral  direction,  nor  indeed  any  special 
purpose,  in  the  original  tale.  It  is  only  a  faithful  record 
of  a  piece  of  human  life,  quite  clearly  and  simply  told. 
But  Tennyson,  when  he  took  it,  had  a  special  aim  in 
view,  and  wrote  it  afresh  with  a  moral  purpose.  He 
wanted  to  represent  the  luxurious  society  which  precedes 
the  downfall  of  a  nation,  especially  after  the  failure  of  a 
religious  revival  founded  on  the  supernatural.  The 
knights  have  now  returned  reckless  from  their  unsuccess- 
ful effort  to  achieve  the  Quest  of  the  Grail ;  not  better 

but  worse  than  before.  Religion,  they  feel,  is  useless,  and 
22 


338  Tennyson 

an  ideal  life  absurb.  They  had  been  sensual,  now  they 
have  become  cynical.  Vivien,  the  lust  of  the  flesh,  the 
enjoyment  of  the  senses  alone,  is  full  mistress  of  the 
world.  Ettarre  represents  this  society  ;  Pelleas  repre- 
sents its  deadly  influence  on  an  innocent  heart  that  be- 
lieves in  love,  purity,  and  truth,  and  their  embodiment  in 
the  King.  He  finds  a  world,  in  which  the  King  is  thought 
to  be  a  fool,  purity  ridiculous,  love  a  lust,  and  the  realm 
of  the  senses  the  only  realm.  Thrown  suddenly  and 
unprepared  into  this  society,  the  full  force  of  disillusion 
struck  on  Pelleas  like  a  storm  and  sank  him  in  the  seas. 
He  is  the  later  Gareth  of  The  Idylls.  Frank,  faithful, 
loving,  innocent,  he  steps  into  life  ;  but  where  Gareth 
is  victor,  he  is  victim.  The  conditions  of  society 
into  which  Gareth  enters  are  all  on  his  side.  He  finds 
life  as  beautiful  and  true  as  he  imagined  it  to  be.  The 
conditions  of  society  into  which  Pelleas  enters  are  all 
against  him.  He  finds  life  the  exact  contrary  of  all  he 
imagined  it  to  be. 

Gareth's  history,  the  history  of  Pelleas,  are  equally 
common  stories.  When,  by  long  neglect,  by  long  indul- 
gence, a  base  society  is  made,  the  souls  and  bodies  of 
far  more  than  half  of  the  innocent  children  sent  into 
the  world  are  murdered.  When  society  is  just  and  pure, 
simple  and  loving  beautiful  things,  the  children  are 
destined  to  a  noble  happiness.  Those  who  make  a 
world  of  which  the  judgment  of  the  pessimist  is  true, 
are  the  worst  of  criminals.  Its  children,  for  the  most 
part  disillusioned  like  Pelleas,  are  driven  into  madness 


Idylls  of  the  King  339 

or  cynicism.  And  cynicism,  or  rather  recklessness  of 
everything  but  of  present  excitement  which  is  the  fore- 
runner of  cynicism,  is  what  Tennyson  sketches  in  Pelleas 
and  Etta r re.  Ettarre  and  her  flock  of  girls  laugh  at  the 
innocence  and  the  love  of  Pelleas.  A  grizzled  knight, 
they  say,  who  knew  the  fashion  of  the  world  were  a 
better  companion  than  this  baby — "  raw,  yet  so  stale." 
Ettarre  promises  him  her  love  that  he  may  win  the  prize 
for  her  and  give  her  fame,  and  when  she  has  got  her 
jewelled  circlet,  flings  his  love  away,  flings  a  taunt  at 
Guinevere,  and  leaves  Pelleas  outside  her  gates  to  cool 
his  romance.  She  is  the  great  lady  of  a  debased  society 
in  which  everything  ideal  is  only  matter  of  mockery. 
Such  a  society  lives  on  the  very  marge  of  the  incoming 
tide  of  weariness.  It  only  continues  to  live  by  the 
fierceness  of  its  strife  to  gain,  hour  by  hour,  enough  of 
light  or  cruel  amusement  to  keep  that  tide  at  bay. 
When  Pelleas  will  not  cease  to  believe  in  Ettarre,  she  is 
bored  to  death,  and  this  turns  to  wrath,  and  wrath  to  hate  ; 
and  when  he  endures  all,  she  pushes  him  out  of  doors 
in  bonds.  When  he  goes,  for  a  moment  she  knows  her- 
self. "  He  is  not  of  my  kind.  He  could  not  love  me 
did  he  know  me  well."  But  the  momentary  touch  of 
conscience  fails  when  Gawain  comes  to  see  her,  bringing 
merriment  and  the  manners  of  the  court  with  him,  and 
she  is  guilty  at  once  with  him.  This  woman  is  Tenny- 
son's ethical  warning  against  a  loose  and  luxury-bitten 
society,  and,  as  ethics,  it  is  well  enough  expressed.  But 
to   bind  up    these  modern   warnings   with  a    mediaeval 


340  Tennyson 

tale  is  to  render  either  the  tale  or  the  warnings  feeble. 
The  naturalism  of  the  story  suffers.  The  allegory  eats 
it  up.  And  the  allegory  suffers,  for  the  ancient  story 
does  not  carry  it. 

Moreover  the  whole  Idyll  is  too  plainly  a  stop-gap,  a 
transition  tale  inserted  to  represent  the  kind  of  society 
which  intervened  between  the  religious  excitement  of 
The  Holy  Grail  and  the  cynical  languor  of  The  Last 
Tournavient.  It  does  not  seem  to  have  naturally  grown 
out  of  Tennyson's  original  conception.  I  conjecture 
this,  because  there  is  little  in  it  of  the  passion  of  an 
artist.  The  shaping  of  the  poem  is  not  fully  imaginative, 
the  work  of  it  seems  jaded,  and  even  the  verse  is  inferior 
to  that  of  the  other  Idylls.  When  Tennyson  attempts 
to  rise  into  passionate  expression,  as  when  Pelleas  turns 
and  shrieks  his  curse  at  Ettarre  and  her  harlot  towers, 
he  becomes  only  violent  without  power.  Even  the 
natural  description  suffers  from  the  artist's  apparent 
want  of  interest  in  his  conception.  That  vivid  sketch, 
at  the  beginning,  of  the  wood  and  of  the  bracken  burn- 
ing round  it  in  the  sunlight,  cannot  keep  up  its  speed 
and  fire  to  the  end.  Either  the  poet's  memory  of  what 
he  saw  played  him  false,  or  he  did  not  see  the  thing  with 
his  usual  clearness.  It  is  like  a  studio-picture,  not  like 
one  painted  in  the  open  air.  Nor  is  there  a  single  piece 
of  noble  or  passionate  writing  in  the  whole  of  it,  save  at 
the  very  end,  when  Pelleas  breaks  into  the  hall  of  Arthur 
swordless,  and  his  ruined  life  upon  his  face,  and  will 
not  speak  to  the  Queen  when  she  speaks  to  him. 


Idylls  of  the  King  341 

But  Pelleas  lifted  up  an  eye  so  fierce 

She  quail'd  ;  and  he,  hissing  "  I  have  no  sword," 

Sprang  from  the  door  into  the  dark.    The  Queen 

Look'd  hard  upon  her  lover,  he  on  her  ; 

And  each  foresaw  the  dolorous  day  to  be  ; 

And  all  talk  died,  as  in  a  grove  all  song 

Beneath  the  shadow  of  some  bird  of  prey  ; 

Then  along  silence  came  upon  the  hall, 

And  Modred  thought,  "  The  time  is  hard  at  hand." 

That  is  finely  done  ;  there  is  more  of  gloom  and  com- 
ing woe  in  it  than  in  all  the  cursing  of  Pelleas.  But  it 
is  alone  ;  it  is  the  only  real  good  piece  of  art  in  this,  the 
poorest  of  all  the  Idylls. 


The  Last  Toiirnament  is  more  a  work  of  art  than  Pel- 
leas and  Ettarre,  though  it  is  by  no  means  up  to  the 
level,  even  in  form,  of  many  of  the  other  Idylls.  It  also, 
like  its  predecessor,  has  the  air  of  being  an  afterthought, 
of  something  inserted  to  point  a  moral,  not  to  adorn  the 
tale.  Since  the  whole  poem  is  a  moral  poem,  we  have 
no  right  to  object  that  this  portion  of  it  points  a  moral, 
but  we  have  a  right  to  ask  that  it  should  seem  a  natural 
branch  of  the  whole  tree.  Such  a  vital  connection  does 
exist  in  the  first  part  ;  but  the  second  part,  the  story  of 
Tristram,  is  not  much  more  than  a  graft,  and  far  too 
plainly  a  graft.  Tristram  and  his  story  is  scarcely  ever 
alluded  to  in  the  rest  of  the  Idylls :  he  has  nothing  to  do 
with  the  Tennysonian  movement  of  the  piece,  and  his 
story,  thus  foisted  in  at  the  end,  is  nothing  more  than 
an  illustration   of  adultery.     The  form  of  the  Idyll  is 


342  Tennyson 

spoiled,  and  we  are  forced  to  place  it  on  the  lower 
plane,  along  with  Pellcas  and  Ettarre. 

The  time  of  the  year  in  the  preceding  Idyll  is  full 
summer,  and  this  represents,  in  Tennyson's  way,  the  full 
flowering  of  the  brutal  society  which  he  describes.  But 
the  season  in  which  the  last  tournament  is  held  is  that  of 
departing  autumn — grey  skies,  wet  winds,  and  all  the 
woods  yellowing  to  their  fall.  This  also  is  Nature's 
reflection  of  the  catastrophe  in  the  Idyll.  Arthur  knows, 
when  the  tale  is  done,  the  guilt  of  Guinevere  ;  and 
Lancelot  and  all  his  kin  are  finally  divided  from  the 
King.  Meantime  we  are  first  shown  the  further  degrada- 
tion of  the  society  drawn  in  Pelleas  and  Ettarre.  The 
story  of  this  social  picture  is  well  introduced.  The  tale 
is  told  of  Lancelot  and  Arthur  riding  through  a  moun- 
tain-pass and  hearing  a  child  wail  : 

A  stump  of  oak  half-dead, 
From  roots  like  some  black  coil  of  carven  snakes, 
Clutch'd  at  the  crag,  and  started  thro'  mid-air 
Bearing  an  eagle's  nest  :  and  thro'  the  tree 
Rush'd  ever  a  rainy  wind,  and  thro'  the  wind 
Pierced  ever  a  child's  cry. 

And  Lancelot  climbed  for  the  child,  and  round  its  throat 
lay  a  ruby  carcanet  which,  when  the  child  died,  the 
Queen  bade  be  tourneyed  for.  The  purest  knight,  she 
said,  should  win  for  the  purest  maiden  the  jewels  of  this 
dead  innocence.  Hence  the  tournament  is  called  The 
Tournatnent  of  the  Dead  Innocence  by  a  court  to  which 
innocence  is  unknown.     The  prize  is  won  by  Tristrarr., 


Idylls  of  the  King  343 

the  free-lover,  and  given  to  Isolt  who  abhors  her  hus- 
band. In  this  fierce  contrast  Tennyson  strikes  out  on 
his  canvas  the  mocking  cynicism  in  which  he  involves 
the  court.  There  is  no  innocence  which  is  not  dead, 
and  there  is  no  love  which  is  innocent. 

Secondly,  before  the  jousts  are  held,  we  see  how  the 
government  of  the  kingdom  has  broken  down.  A  knight, 
once  of  the  Table  Round,  has  set  up  a  new  Round 
Table  in  the  north,  framed  directly  counter  to  Arthur's 
Table.  He  slays,  burns,  robs,  and  maims  the  poor, 
hangs  the  knights  of  Arthur,  and  bids  the  King  beware, 
for— 

his  hour  is  come  ; 
The  heathen  are  upon  him,  his  long  lance 
Broken,  and  his  Excalibur  a  straw, 

Arthur  rides  awjxy  to  chastise  this  felon,  and  when  he 
returns  all  is  ruin.  But  before  he  goes — and  this  is 
finely  conceived  by  Tennyson — he  touches  those  two 
who  have  destroyed  his  work,  and  leaves  an  impression 
of  himself  upon  tham  ;  on  Lancelot,  that  which  kindles 
remorse  in  him,  on  Guinevere,  that  which  awakens  awe 
in  her.  She  feels  his  apartness,  his  greatness,  and  his 
spirituah'ly. 

In  her  high  bower  the  Queen, 
Working  a  t^^pestry,  lifted  up  her  head, 
Watch'd  her  lord  pass,  and  knew  not  that  she  sigh'd. 
Then  ran  across  her  memory  the  strange  rhyme 
Of  bygone  Merlin,  "  Where  is  he  who  knows? 
From  the  great  deep  to  the  great  deep  he  goes." 


344  Tennyson 

It  is  the  theme,  the  introduction  theme,  of  the  Idylls 
that  follow — Guinevere^  The  Passing  of  Arthur — and  its 
dim  melody,  brought  in  here,  is  the  thought  of  a  true 
artist. 

Then  comes  the  tournament.  A  day  of  brooding 
storm,  low  thunder,  sunless  skies,  and  then  of  heavy 
rain,  images,  in  Tennyson's  fashion,  the  exhaustion,  the 
dull  coarseness  and  draggle  of  the  last  days  of  luxury 
and  adultery.  Lancelot,  all  weary,  like  a  late  guest  over 
a  fading  fire,  sat  umpire  of  the  lists,  half  careless,  half 
angry  with  the  lawlessness  and  cowardice  of  the  tourney. 
All  its  rules  were  broken  ;  and  when  Tristram  entered 
the  lists  no  one  was  brave  enough  to  oppose  him.  The 
tournament  ends  in  mockery  and  cursing,  and  Lancelot 
cries, 

"  The  glory  of  our  Round  Table  is  no  more." 

When  Tristram  comes  for  the  prize,  Lancelot  asks, 
"  Art  thou  the  purest,  brother  .? "  and  Tristram  scoffs, 
"  Be  happy  in  your  fair  Queen,  as  I  in  mine."  There  is 
no  trace  of  shame  left  ;  the  nakedness  of  life  is  openly 
displayed.  When  Tristram  rides  round  the  lists  with 
his  prize  he  is  discourteous  to  all  the  women.  "  This 
day,"  he  cries,  "  my  Queen  of  Beauty  is  not  here."  So, 
even  the  glory  of  courtesy,  that  last  infirmity  of  chiv- 
alry, is  gone.  Then  falls  thick  rain,  and  in  the  wet  and 
weariness  the  women  mock  : 

Praise  the  patient  saints, 
Our  one  white  day  of  Innocence  hath  past, 
Tho'  somewhat  draggled  at  the  skirt.     So  be  it. 


Idylls  of  the  King  345 

At  the  revels  which  follow,  the  mirth  is  so  loud  that  the 
Queen  retires  indignant,  and  in  her  bosom  pain  is  lord. 
And  the  first  part  ends  with  a  talk  between  Tristram  and 
Dagonet  the  fool,  which  insists  in  other  fashion  on  the 
ruin  a  general  sensuality  has  wrought. 

The  second  part  takes  up  the  ancient  story  of  Tris- 
tram and  Isolt,  and  the  story  is  used  and  modified  by 
Tennyson  to  represent  another  phase  of  illicit  love  and 
its  result  on  character.  The  love  of  Tristram  and  Isolt 
in  his  hands  is  of  a  very  different  type  from  that  of 
Lancelot  and  Guinevere.  Lancelot  and  the  Queen 
have  loved  from  the  beginning,  and  through  the  golden 
times  of  the  Round  Table.  The  nobleness  of  the  time, 
and  the  nobleness  it  made  in  them,  pervaded  their  love, 
and  lifted  it  above  itself.  It  is  always  faithful,  always 
courteous,  always  silent,  always  intense,  and  often  re- 
pentant. But  Tennyson  makes  Tristram  and  Isolt  love 
without  any  nobleness.  Their  passion  has  nothing  spirit- 
ual in  it,  nothing  that  lifts  it  into  the  imaginative  realm. 
The  light  that  leads  astray  is  the  fire  of  sense  alone. 
Tristram  is  unfaithful,  and  has  become  uncourteous. 
He  talks  of  the  freedom  of  Love  to  love  wherever  it  may 
please,  and  of  their  love  failing  when  beauty  fails,  and 
when  desire  is  cold.  He  speaks  in  this  light,  tossing 
way  in  the  presence  of  the  woman  whom  he  has  loved  ; 
and  Isolt,  though  she  shows  indignation,  suffers  it  at  last 
with  indifference.  In  the  midst  of  this  Mark  comes  by, 
and  cleaves  Tristram  through  the  brain. 

This  sketch,  not  of  our  Tristram,  but  of  an  invented 


34^  Tennyson 

Tristram,  of  his  liglitness  of  character,  and  his  random 
heart,  of  his  wandering  thought,  of  his  soul  led  by  the 
senses,  and  his  conscience  hushed  by  pleasure — and  of 
the  result  of  these  characteristics  made  into  a  theory  of 
life  and  love — is  admirably  done.  What  he  is,  is  em- 
bodied in  his  song. 

Free  love — free  field — we  love  but  while  we  may  : 
The  woods  are  hush'd,  their  music  is  no  more  : 
The  leaf  is  dead,  the  yearning  past  away  : 
New  leaf,  new  life — the  days  of  frost  are  o'er : 
New  life,  new  love,  to  suit  the  newer  day  : 
New  loves  are  sweet  as  those  that  went  before  : 
Free  love — free  field — we  love  but  while  we  may. 

The  introduction  of  this  Tristram  story  no  doubt  en- 
hances, in  another  form,  the  whole  of  the  ethical  lesson 
to  nations  and  to  individuals  which  is  contained  in  the 
first  part,  but  I  feel  from  the  point  of  view  of  art  that 
there  are  strong  objections  to  the  whole  of  it. 

First,  the  old  story  of  Tristram  and  Isolt  is  entirely 
changed  and  degraded.  Tristram  is  not  the  Tristram  we 
know,  nor  Isolt  our  Isolt  ;  they  are  both  vulgarised.  All 
the  romance  is  taken  out  of  them  ;  tlieir  great  and  inevi- 
table love  is  turned  into  a  common  intrigue.  Their  mighty 
sorrow,  which  has  drawn  the  heart  of  the  world  to  it,  which 
so  many  poems  have  made  into  a  purification  of  the  soul, 
and  to  which  Wagner  gave  all  his  strength,  is  left  un- 
touched by  Tennyson.  Nay,  their  characters,  as  he  draws 
them,  are  incapable  of  such  a  sorrow.  No  one  has  a  right 
to  alter  out  of  recognition  two  characters  in  one  of  the 
great  poetic  stories  of  the  world,  and  to  blacken  them. 


Idylls  of  the   King  347 

Tennyson  ought  to  have  had  more  reverence  for  a  great 
tale,  and  more  intuition.  What  he  does  is  all  the  worse 
because  ])ortions  of  the  ancient  story  are  kept  and  dwelt 
on,  so  that  we  are  forced  to  think  back  over  the  whole 
tale  we  know,  and  to  see  through  this  travesty  the  noble 
things  which  have  been  travestied.  To  make  a  great 
tale  in  this  fashion  the  stalking-horse  of  morality,  to  use 
it  for  a  passing  shot  at  adultery,  to  degrade  characters 
which  are  not  degraded,  is  an  iniquity  in  art.  If 
Tennyson  wanted  to  do  this  kind  of  thing  for  the  sake 
of  a  moral  end,  he  ought  to  have  left  the  beautiful 
romance  alone,  and  to  have  invented  a  quite  new  story 
for  his  purpose. 

Moreover,  this  piece  about  Tristram  and  Isolt  was 
quite  unnecessary.  The  story  told  of  them  may,  as  I 
said,  enhance  by  a  fresh  example  the  ethical  aim  of  the 
first  part  ;  but  it  is  weaker  than  the  first  part,  and  the 
lesson  is  as  strong  without  it.  The  additional  weight 
given  by  it  is  not  worth  the  artistic  mistake  the  poet 
makes  in  introducing  it.  The  reader,  made  angry  by 
the  degradation  of  Tristram  and  Isolt,  becomes  angry 
also  with  the  moralities  of  the  beginning  of  the  Idyll. 
The  first  part  says  all  that  was  necessary  to  say,  and  says 
it  well. 

Thirdly,  to  shove  in  at  the  end,  and  into  a  corner,  an 
immense  story  of  human  passion,  covering  as  many  years 
and  as  many  events  as  the  story  of  Lancelot  himself,  was 
a  complete  mistake.  Tristram  introduced  as  the  victor 
in  the  jousts  is  well  enough,  and  we  may  even  endure  his 


34^  Tennyson 

soulless  talk,  though  it  falsifies  his  ancient  character  ;  but 
to  attempt  to  force  a  story,  which  is  like  a  great  sea,  into 
this  narrow  pool,  is  beyond  endurance,  especially  when 
the  first  event  (that  of  the  love-drink)  which,  by  making 
the  love  of  these  two  inevitable,  raises  the  tale  into  fate- 
fulness,  is  deliberately  left  out.  It  would  have,  by  excus- 
ing them,  spoilt  the  ethical  use  which  Tennyson  makes 
of  their  story.     This  is  too  bad  of  him. 

Moreover,  Tristram  and  Isolt  take  us  away  from  the 
main  contention.  At  the  very  moment  when  the  whole 
conception  of  Tennyson  should  have  been  concentrated 
into  white  light,  in  which  everything  else  should  be  lost, 
around  Arthur  and  Lancelot  and  Guinevere,  we  are 
carried  away  to  Tintagil,  and  forced  to  remember  at 
that  distant  place  the  whole  of  the  Tristram  story.  It 
would  have  been  far  better  to  have  omitted  it  altogether, 
and  to  have  told,  for  the  second  part  of  this  Idyll,  the 
history  of  the  last  meeting  of  Lancelot  and  Guinevere,  of 
the  treachery  of  Modred,  and  of  the  flight  of  Guinevere, 
which  at  present  is  told  in  the  Idyll  of  Guinevere.  These 
belong  to  this  Idyll  properly,  for  when  Arthur  returns 
from  his  expedition  to  the  north,  he  finds  Guinevere 
gone.  Then  too,  the  expedition  to  the  north  could  be 
told  in  its  proper  place.  Tennyson  would  not  have  been 
obliged  to  drag  it  in,  like  a  belated  recollection,  in  the 
middle  of  Tristram's  ride  through  the  forest.  These, 
then,  are  the  unfortunate  things  into  which  the  ethical 
direction  of  a  work  of  art,  when  it  is  primary  and  not 
secondary,  forces  an  artist. 


Idylls  of  the  King  349 

The  description  of  Arthur's  expedition  is  the  one 
excellent  thing  in  this  Idyll.  It  has  the  keenest  sight  of 
the  things  described,  and  it  sets  Arthur  forth,  as  he 
ought  to  be  at  this  time,  in  heroic  proportions.  We  see 
him,  the  unstained,  the  majestic  King,  midst  of  a  stained 
and  degraded  world,  faithful  alone  among  the  faithless. 
We  see  also  the  wild  northern  land  near  the  sea,  the 
black  and  lonely  tower  among  the  marshes  ;  and  they 
are  painted  with  undiminished  vividness  and  strength. 

He  dream'd  ;  but  Arthur  with  a  hundred  spears 

Rode  far,  till  o'er  the  illimitable  reed, 

And  many  a  glancing  plash  and  sallowy  isle. 

The  wide-wing'd  sunset  of  the  misty  marsh 

Glared  on  a  huge  machicolated  tower 

That  stood  with  open  doors,  whereout  was  roU'd 

A  roar  of  riot. 

One  of  the  knights  of  the  Round  Table  has  been  hung 
near  the  gate  on  a  dead  tree,  and  beside  him  hangs  a 
horn.     And  Arthur  blew  the  horn — 

Then  at  the  dry  harsh  roar  of  the  great  horn, 
That  sent  the  face  of  all  the  marsh  aloft 
An  ever  upward-rushing  storm  and  cloud 
Of  shriek  and  plume — 

a  splendid  description  of  the  host  of  water-birds  rising 
startled  from  the  marsh — the  felon  knight  comes  forth, 
and  before  the  mighty  presence  of  the  King,  not  a  blow 
stricken,  fell — 

as  the  crest  of  some  slow-arching  wave, 
Heard  in  dead  night  along  that  table-shore, 
Drops  flat,  and  after  the  great  waters  break 


350  Tennyson 

Whitening  for  half  a  league,  and  thin  themselves, 
Far  over  sands  marbled  with  moon  and  cloud, 
From  less  and  less  to  nothing;   thus  he  fell. 

This,  with  the  illimitable  reed  and  the  wide-winged 
sunset  over  glancing  plash  and  shallowy  isle,  is  a  mag- 
nificent description  of  Nature.  Every  adjective  in  it  is 
superbly  chosen  ;  but  not  less  magnificent  is  the  last 
vision  of  the  flaming  tower  reddening  all  the  meres  and 
the  sea  beyond  : 

Which  half  that  autumn  night,  like  the  live  North, 

Red-pulsing  up  thro'  Alioth  and  Alcor, 

Made  all  above  it,  and  a  hundred  meres 

About  it,  as  the  vi^ater  Moab  saw 

Come  round  by  the  east,  and  out  beyond  them  flush'd 

The  long  low  dune  and  lazy-plunging  sea. 

Lancelot,  of  all  the  male  characters  in  the  Idylls  of 
the  Kingy  is  the  least  troubled  by  tlie  allegory.  He  is  so 
un-allegorical  that  when  he  is  present  with  the  other 
characters,  at  those  times  when  they  are  allegorical,  he 
confuses  their  symbolism,  or  materialises  them  into  real 
personages.  He  often  seems  like  a  man  among  ghosts. 
His  tale  is  modernised,  but  not  so  flagrantly  modernised 
as  that  of  the  rest.  We  might  sometimes  mistake  him 
for  the  Lancelot  of  Malory. 

But  though  not  allegorical,  he  is  ethical,  and,  in  this 
sphere,  he  is  entirely  modernised.  The  moral  teaching 
embodied  in  him  and  his  relation  to  Guinevere  and  Ar- 
thur, gathers  round  the  question  of  faithfulness  and 
unfaithfulness  in  love  and  marriage.  Of  the  three, 
Lancelot  is  again   the  most   actual,  if   I    may   use  that 


Idylls  of  the  King  351 

word  in  this  manner.  But  he  is  actual  as  a  gentleman 
of  our  own  time,  not  as  the  romance  knights  of  the 
thirteenth  century,  or  of  the  book  of  Malory.  They 
had  a  totally  different  code  of  honour  in  their  love- 
matters  from  that  which  rules  our  social  conscience. 

It  is  quite  allowable  in  art  to  re-create  the  characters 
of  an  old  tale,  provided  this  re-creation  ennobles  the 
men  and  women  as  much  as  the  original  treatment,  or 
awakens  as  much  symi)athy  for  them.  The  old  story 
gathers  our  affections  in  one  fashion  round  Arthur, 
Guinevere,  and  Lancelot.  Tennyson  does  it  in  another 
way  altogether — in  the  ethical,  not  in  the  romantic  way. 
He  was  justified  in  this  if  his  form  was  good.  But  he 
keeps  so  much  of  the  romantic  story  that  he  forces  us  to 
mix  up  his  Lancelot  with  the  ancient  Lancelot,  and  the 
two  clash  in  our  minds.  Again  and  again  their  unfitted- 
ness  each  to  each,  the  irreconcilability  of  their  atmos- 
pheres, disturbs  the  reader  of  the  Idylls.  It  is  difficult 
to  keep  them  apart,  yet  to  read  the  poem  with  justice  to 
Tennyson  we  must  do  this  difficult  thing.  We  must 
ignore  the  Lancelot  of  the  Romances,  when  at  the  same 
time  we  are  continually  reminded  of  him. 

Outside  of  this  criticism  which  has  only  to  do  with 
the  form  of  the  tale,  Tennyson's  conception  and  drawing 
of  Lancelot  are  full  of  power.  He  is  Arthur's  earliest 
and  dearest  friend.  He  and  Arthur  swear  undying 
fealty  to  one  another  on  the  field  of  battle.  On  Lan- 
celot's steadiness  in  this,  since  he  is  the  greatest  of  the 
knights    and    has   the   largest    clan,    depends   half    the 


352  Tennyson 

strength  and  enduringness  of  the  Round  Table.  He  has 
hhnself  an  unbroken  admiration  for  the  King,  and  pays 
him  undiminished  honour  and  affection  from  the  1)egin- 
ning  to  the  end.  He  never  wavers  in  this  faithfuhiess, 
which  is  the  root  of  his  character.  So  he  is  represented 
in  the  old  story,  and  so  Tennyson  represents  him. 

But  at  one  point,  not  in  romantic  eyes  but  in  ours,  he 
is  unfaithful  to  Arthur.  He  loves  Guinevere  and  takes 
away  her  love  from  the  King.  There  is  a  certain  inevi- 
tableness  in  this  love,  for  which  Tennyson  allows,  while 
he  condemns  the  love.  And  there  is  an  absolute  faith- 
fulness in  it  on  both  sides  which  keeps  the  characters 
noble,  while  the  thing  itself  is  represented  as  not  noble. 
Lancelot,  the  lover,  is  as  constant  to  Guinevere,  as 
Lancelot,  the  friend,  is  to  the  King.  But  it  is  in  this 
double  faithfulness  that  the  pain  and  the  punishment  of 
life  inhere — faithful  to  Arthur,  but  unfaithful  at  the 
dearest  point  ;  faithful  to  Guinevere,  but  making  her 
unfaithful  at  that  central  point  of  life  in  which  the  fate 
of  her  husband,  of  his  work,  and  of  his  kingdom  is 
contained. 

This  is  a  tragic  position.  It  cannot  be  called  tragic 
in  the  Romances,  for  in  the  chivalric  circles  of  the  ro- 
mantic centuries  Lancelot's  love  of  the  Queen  did  not 
altogether  clash,  in  men's  minds,  with  his  fidelity  to 
Arthur.  But  Tennyson,  making  the  first  element  in  the 
situation  Lancelot's  profound  constancy  (he  cannot  love 
the  King  less,  he  cannot  love  the  Queen  less),  wraps 
Lancelot   up    in   the   moral    atmosphere  which,  in  our 


Idylls  of  the  King  353 

century  as  in  others,  surrounds  the  marriage  tie,  and 
the  situation  is  at  once  ethically  tragic.  Lancelot's 
fidelity  to  the  King  jars  with  his  fidelity  to  Guinevere, 
and  his  life  is  rent  to  pieces  between  the  two.  Both  are 
the  deepest  things  in  him,  and  both  are  at  war  in  his 
heart  ;  and  the  best  piece  of  character-work  in  the  Idylls 
is  the  slow  delineation  of  this  intimate  and  tormented 
strife.  He  is  true  to  the  King  and  true  to  the  Queen, 
but  his  truth  to  the  King  makes  him  shrink  from  the 
Queen,  and  his  truth  to  the  Queen  makes  him  shrink 
from  the  King.  Tennyson  puts  this  terrible  position- 
terrible  to  the  character  he  represents  Lancelot  to  be- 
in  the  two  well-known  lines — 

His  honour  rooted  in  dishonour  stood,  ,■ 

And  faith  unfaithful  kept  him  falsely  true.  / 

The  battle  in  his  soul  comes  to  a  crisis  in  the  Idyll  of 

Lancelot  and  Elaine.     Arthur  asks   Lancelot  if  he  will 

come  to  the  jousts  for  the  Diamond.      "  No,"  he  replies, 

for  he  thinks  the  Queen   wishes  him  to  stay  with  her. 

"  To  blame,  my  Lord  Lancelot,"  the  Queen  says,  when 

Arthur  is  gone.     "  You  must    go  ;  our  knights  and  the 

crowd  will  murmur  if  you  stay."     "  Are  you  so  wise,  my 

Queen  ? "    answers  Lancelot,  vext  that  he  must  seem  to 

have  lied  to  the   King,  ''  once  it  was  not  so."     But  he 

obeys,   and  on  his  way  to  the  jousts  he  meets  Elaine, 

who  loves  him,  and  who,  being  unloved  by  him,  dies  of 

her   love.       The   Queen   is   jealous,   and  her   suspicion 

makes  Lancelot  realise  the  restlessness  and  misery  of  a 

23 


354  Tennyson 

life  which  absohite  trust  between  him  and  Guinevere 
can  alone  make  endurable.  Moreover,  he  is  wronged 
by  her  jealousy,  and  to  be  thus  wronged  in  love  by  one 
we  love,  while  it  deepens  love,  makes  it  seem  for  the 
time  contemptible.  He  is  thought  to  be  untrue  when  he 
is  conscious  he  is  most  true.  And  he  disdains  love,  life, 
and  all  things. 

Then  the  King  is  sorry  that  his  knight  .s  unable  to 
love — why  could  he  not  love  this  maiden  ?  And  the 
unsuspiciousness  of  the  King  makes  Lancelot  conscious 
of  friendship  failed  and  of  honour  lost.  He  is  thought 
to  be  true  when  he  knows  he  is  most  untrue.  This  is  a 
double  torture,  and  it  is  finely  wrought  out  by  Tenny- 
son, It  comes  to  a  point  of  self-knowledge  and  self- 
abasement  in  his  soliloquy,  when,  leaving  the  Queen 
wrathful,  and  Arthur  sorrowing  and  surprised,  and  the 
girl  who  loved  and  died  for  him  in  her  grave,  he  sits 
thinking  by  the  river,  and  wishes  that  his  life  had  never 
been.  The  lines  in  which  he  analyses  his  inmost  soul 
are  equally  plain  and  subtle,  full  of  that  curious  truth 
with  which  a  man,  embittered  for  the  moment,  views 
himself  ;  and  as  concentrated  as  if  they  had  been  done 
by  Milton's  intellectual  force.  Indeed,  some  of  them 
are  entirely  in  Milton's  manner  : 

For  what  am  I  ?     What  profits  it  my  name 
Of  greatest  knight  ?      I  fought  for  it  and  have  it  j 
Pleasure  to  have  it,  none  ;  to  lose  it,  pain  ; 
Now  grown  a  part  of  me  :  but  what  use  in  it  ? 
To  make  men  worse  by  making  my  sin  known  ? 
Or  sin  seem  less,  the  sinner  seeming  great? 


Idylls  of  the  King  355 

Alas  for  Arthur's  greatest  knight,  a  man 
Not  after  Arthur's  heart  !     I  needs  must  break 
These  bonds  that  so  defame  me  :  not  without 
She  wills  it :  would  I,  if  she  will'd  it  ?  nay, 
Who  knows  ?  but  if  I  would  not,  then  may  God, 
I  pray  him,  send  a  sudden  Angel  down 
To  seize  me  by  the  hair  and  bear  me  far, 
And  fling  me  deep  in  that  forgotten  mere, 
Among  the  tumbled  fragments  of  the  hills  ! 

It  is  the  commonest  cry  of  weakness  in  the  unhappy 
hours  of  passion  to  ask  the  gods  to  work  a  miracle.  But 
what  the  will  does  not  will  to  do  the  gods  leave  alone. 

And  now,  remorse,  envenomed  by  love's  vexation, 
grew  in  the  man  ;  and  when  the  quest  of  the  Holy  Grail 
arose,  Lancelot,  thinking  he  might  get  rid  of  his  sin, 
thinking  the  miracle  had  come— his  love  less  dear  to 
him  for  the  moment,  because  the  Queen  had  been  un- 
just to  him-said  to  himself  :  "  If  I  can  but  see  this 
Holy  Thing,  my  sin  may  be  plucked  out  of  my  heart." 
But  while  he  strove,  his  love  awoke  again,  for  not  from 
without  but  from  within  is  passion  quelled  ;  and  the 
strife  so  deepened  that  madness  came  upon  him, 
Andwhipt  him  into  waste  fields  far  away. 

Afterwards,  when  he  half  saw  the  Holy  Grail,  it  knew 
that  his  wrong  love  was  dearer  than  his  desire  to  be 
right,  and  it  smote  him  down.  Yet  nobleness  lived  in 
him  and  might  have  come  to  flower  had  he  but  willed 
to  surrender  his  love.  But  how  could  he  surrender  it 
when  the  surrender  meant  misery  to  Guinevere?  Was 
he  not  bound  to  be  faithful  to  her,  even  if  he  perished 


356  Tennyson 

for  it  eternally  ?  And  in  that  thought,  which  was  of 
course  half  made  up  by  his  own  desire,  the  personal 
wrong  to  Arthur,  the  still  greater  wrong  to  the  kingdom 
and  to  society  which  his  love  was  slowly  accomplishing, 
became  like  vapours  in  the  sun.  He  ceased  to  desire 
freedom  from  his  guilt.  And  as  in  all  the  heat  of 
his  feeble  remorse  and  of  his  search  for  the  Grail, 
he  had  never  willed,  but  only  wished  for  righteousness, 
the  failure  of  the  spiritual  excitement  left  him  weaker 
than  before,  but  less  repentant.  In  Pelleas  and  Ettarrc, 
the  Idyll  which  succeeds  the  Holy  Grail,  he  has  wholly 
lost  his  remorse.  He  is  at  peace,  and  has  given  himself 
wholly  to  his  love.  These  are  the  lines  from  PcUeas 
and  £tta:'re,  in  v.hi^h  we  see  the  quiet  content  of 
accepted  guilt  : 

Not  long  thereafter  from  the  city  gates 

Issued  Sir  Lancelot  riding  airily, 

Warm  with  a  gracious  parting  from  the  Queen, 

Peace  at  his  heart,  and  gazing  at  a  star 

And  marvelling  what  it  was. 

But  this  peaceful  pleasure  in  wrong,  when  all  effort  to 
overcome  it  is  over,  does  not  endure.  Love  in  unright- 
eousness loses  animation  at  last,  and  the  pleasure  of  it 
passes  into  languor.  In  the  Idyll  of  The  Last  Tourna- 
ment Lancelot  presides  in  Arthur's  seat  instead  of  the 
King,  and  all  the  world  seems  to  him  lifeless.  He  has 
lost  all  care,  even  for  the  laws  of  chivalry  : 

Sighing  weariedly,  as  one 
Who  sits  and  gazes  on  a  faded  fire, 
When  all  the  goodlier  guests  are  past  away, 


Idylls  of  the  King  357 

Sat  their  great  umpire,  looking  o'er  the  lists. 
He  saw  the  laws  that  ruled  the  tournament 
Broken,  but  spake  not. 

Nevertheless,  long  love,  in  spite  of  languor,  holds  him 
by  a  thousand  ties  to  the  Queen,  till  she  herself,  fearful 
of  discovery,  bids  him  go.  But  to  the  very  close  he  is 
loveloyal,  courteous,  obedient  to  the  woman  whom  he 
loved  ;  and  when  he  leaves  her  he  repents  and  dies. 
His  faithfulness  even  in  false  love  is  reckoned  to  him 
for  righteousness,  or  rather,  when  he  ceases  to  violate  his 
conscience,  becomes  a  root  of  righteousness  in  him. 
This  is  Tennyson's  ethical  picture  of  this  tragic  situa- 
tion, and  it  is  done  with  great  poetic  insight  into  the 
human  heart.  Moreover  (though  it  is  charged  through- 
out with  a  moral  lesson)  the  artistic  representation  is, 
on  the  whole,  the  foremost  thing. 

I  may  say  the  same,  though  not  so  strongly,  of  the 
representation  of  Guinevere.  It  is  said  that  Tennyson 
intended  her,  in  his  allegory,  to  image  forth  the  Heart 
(or  what  we  mean  by  that  term)  in  human  nature.  She 
certainly  does  not  represent  the  infinite  variety  of  the 
human  affections.  However,  by  falling  short  of  the 
allegorical  aim  of  the  poet,  she  gains  as  a  real  person. 
She  is  a  living  woman,  not  an  abstraction.  But  at  the 
same  time  she  is  not  an  interesting  woman.  She  repre- 
sents a  somewhat  common  type.  Her  intelligence  is  of 
the  slightest,  and  her  character  has  little  variety.  We 
infer  that  she  had  charm,  but  it  does  not  appear  in  the 
Idylls  of  the  King,  save  once  when  she  talks  with  Gareth 


358  Tennyson 

on  the  hillside.  She  is  stately  and  lovely,  courteous, 
eager  to  please,  capable  of  a  great  passion,  and,  in  this 
Idyll,  of  a  great  repentance  ;  but  this  is  nothing  ex- 
traordinary. Such  a  woman  may  be  found  anywhere. 
There  is  nothing  especially  creative  in  Tennyson's  con- 
ception.    She  is  a  Queen,  but  not  a  queen  in  poetry. 

Young,  she  threw  herself  recklessly  into  her  love. 
In  after  years  she  loved  on,  but  with  a  prudence  for 
which  Lancelot  half  reproaches  her.  She  admires  her 
husband,  but  the  reasons  for  which  she  admires  him  are, 
she  thinks,  reasons  why  she  should  not  love  him  ;  and 
she  is  cool  and  still  enough — in  an  hour  when  passion  is 
in  abeyance — to  contrast  him  in  Lancelot'c  presence 
with  Lancelot  ;  and  to  analyse  why  she  came  to  love 
Lancelot  more  than  Arthur,  as  if  it  were  an  intellectual 
inquiry.  This,  too,  is  essentially  usual,  and  her  passion 
has  little  to  separate  her  from  the  rest  of  her  sex  into 
an  individual  interest,  such  as  Browning  could  not  have 
failed  to  give  to  her.  The  central  passage  of  her  delin- 
eation is  in  Lancelot  and  Elaine.  Tennyson  marks  it  as 
important,  for  he  quotes  a  thought  from  it  in  the  last 
speech  of  Guinevere  after  her  parting  from  the  King — 
that  phrase  about  light  and  colour.  Lancelot  asks  if 
Arthur  has  said  aught. 

She  broke  into  a  little  scornful  laugh  : 
"  Arthur,  my  lord,  Arthur,  the  faultless  King, 
That  passionate  perfection,  my  good  lord —  . 
But  who  can  gaze  upon  the  sun  in  heaven  ? 
He  never  spake  word  of  reproach  to  me, 
He  never  had  a  glimpse  of  mine  untruth, 


Idylls  of  the  King  359 

He  cares  not  for  me :  only  here  to-day 

There  gleam'd  a  vague  suspicion  in  his  eyes  : 

Some  meddling  rogue  has  tamper'd  with  him — else 

Rapt  in  this  fancy  of  his  Table  Round, 

And  swearing  men  to  vows  impossible, 

To  make  them  like  himself  :  but,  friend,  to  me 

He  is  all  fault  who  hath  no  fault  at  all : 

For  who  loves  me  must  have  a  touch  of  earth  ; 

The  low  sun  makes  the  colour  :  I  am  yours, 

Not  Arthur's,  as  ye  know,  save  by  the  bond." 

She  Stands  forth  then — settled  down  in  the  wrong, 
and  thinking  herself  right.  In  the  same  Idyll  jealousy 
comes  upon  her.  In  her  jealousy  she  is  still  the  ordi- 
nary woman.  It  is  true  that  a  woman  does  not  show, 
while  she  is  jealous,  variety  of  character.  Jealousy  eats 
up  all  other  feelings  and  interests.  But  if  she  be  a 
woman  of  intellect,  power,  or  variety,  what  she  says  in 
her  jealousy — since  it  is  said  in  the  very  hell  of  passion 
— will  at  least  display  shreds  of  these  qualities.  Guine- 
vere is  without  them.  That  which  Tennyson  makes 
her  say  in  the  passage  beginning 

It  may  be  I  am  quicker  of  belief 

Than  you  believe  me,  Lancelot  of  the  Lake, 

has  not  sufficient  strength  for  the  situation.  It  may  be 
that  Tennyson  desired  to  run  the  character  on  very 
simple  lines,  but,  if  so,  the  simplicity  should  have  been 
either  forcible  or  pathetic.  It  is  neither  :  it  is  some- 
what commonplace.  It  may  be,  he  thought  that  to  keep 
her  the  great  lady  he  was  bound  to  subdue  her  to  this 
moderated  tone,   under  which   she   is   supposed  to  veil 


360  Tennyson 

her  wrath.  But  the  passion  does  not  appear  under  the 
phrases  —  the  tongues  of  flame  do  not  lick  upwards 
through  the  crust.  It  is  worth  while  to  read  the  scene 
between  Cleopatra  and  the  messenger  who  tells  her  that 
Anthony  is  married  to  Octavia,  and  contrast  it  with  this 
passage  of  Tennyson's.  Cleopatra  is  furious  with  jeal- 
ousy ;  she  is  the  i)assion  itself,  but  in  the  very  heat  of  it, 
what  imagination,  what  power,  what  intellect  dazzle  from 
her  like  lightnings  !  The  myriad  variety  of  the  woman 
emerges  through  the  dominant  passion. 

After  this  jealousy — being  convinced  that  it  was  base- 
less— she,  like  Lancelot,  settles  down  into  the  pleasant 
peacefulness  of  accepted  wrong  ;  but  as  this  peaceful- 
ness  does  not  last  with  Lancelot,  so  it  does  not  last  with 
Guinevere,  and  Tennyson  tells,  and  excellently,  of  the 
waking  of  her  conscience.  When  the  moral  conduct  of 
life,  when  the  great  sanctions  of  morality  are  to  be  rep- 
resented, Tennyson  impassionates  them  and  lifts  them 
into  poetry.  This  is  one  of  his  greatest  powers.  He 
cannot  draw  the  passions  themselves  or  their  working 
with  the  excellence  of  the  great  masters,  but  he  does 
draw  with  a  level  power  the  moral  exaltation  which  fol- 
lows on  noble  passions  nobly  felt,  or  the  moral  depres- 
sion which  follows  when  they  begin  to  feel  themselves 
ignoble.     Henceforth 

the  Powers  that  tend  the  soul, 
To  help  it  from  the  death  that  cannot  die, 
And  save  it  even  in  extremes,  began 
To  vex  and  plague  her. 


Idylls  of  the  King  361 

Grim  faces  and  vague  spiritual  fears  beset  her  as  she 
lies  awake  at  night  beside  the  sleeping  King.  Or,  if  she 
sleep,  she  dreams 

An  awful  dream  ;  for  then  she  seem'd  to  stand 
On  some  vast  plain  before  a  setting  sun, 
And  from  the  sun  there  swiftly  made  at  her 
A  ghastly  something,  and  its  shadow  flew 
Before  it,  till  it  touch'd  her,  and  she  turn'd — 
When  lo  !  her  own,  that  broadening  from  her  feet, 
And  blackening,  swallow'd  all  the  land,  and  in  it 
Far  cities  burnt,  and  with  a  cry  she  woke. 

And  all  this  trouble  grew,  till  she  could  bear  no  more, 
and  bade  Lancelot  go.  On  the  eve  of  their  parting  all 
is  known.  The  shame  outbreaks,  and  fills  the  Court  and 
land.  Weeping,  they  ride  away  and  sever,  he  to  his 
castle,  she  to  the  convent  of  Almesbury,  and  all  night 
long  as  she  rode  the  spirits  of  the  waste  and  weald 
moaned  round  her,  and  the  raven,  flying  high 

Croak'd,  and  she  thought,  "  He  spies  a  field  of  death" — 

for  what  her  dream  presaged  was  nigh  at  hand. 

All  this  is  told  in  the  beginning  of  the  Idyll  of  Guin- 
evere, the  story  of  which  properly  opens  at  her  coming 
to  Almesbury,  where  she  lives,  no  one  knowing  who  she 
is,  and  is  waited  on  by  a  young  and  innocent  novice. 
She  is  alone  with  her  past  love  and  with  her  sin,  and 
sometimes  the  soft  memory  of  the  one  is  with  her,  and 
sometimes  the  grim  presence  of  the  other.  Her  repent- 
ance is  not  full  as  yet.  She  still  regrets.  The  little 
novice  talks  of  the  wicked  Queen,  and  urges  that  the 


362  Tennyson 

King's  grief  is  the  greatest  in  all  the  land.  "  May  I  not 
grieve,"  Guinevere  says,  "  with  the  grief  of  the  whole 
realm  ? "  "  Yes,"  replies  the  little  maid,  "  all  women 
must  grieve  that  it  was  a  woman  who  wrought  this 
confusion  in  the  Table  Round."  "  O  maiden,"  answers 
the  Queen,  "  what  dost  thou  know  of  the  great  world  ? ' 
And  when  the  maid  speaks  further  of  Lancelot  himself 
and  his  disloyalty,  she  can  bear  it  no  more.  Lancelot  is 
first  with  her  still,  and  she  breaks  forth  in  sudden  flush 
of  wrathful  heat,  thinking  that  the  child  has  been  set  on 
to  do  this  by  the  Abbess.  "  Spy  and  traitress,"  she  cries, 
*'  get  thee  hence  !  " 

Then  she  is  sorry  for  her  anger.  "  'T  is  my  own  guilt," 
she  says,  "  that  betrayc  itself  ;  "  whereat  (in  a  subtle  pas- 
sage of  self-deceiving)  she  argujs  whether  she  repents, 
and  does  the  very  thing  the  not  doing  of  which  she 
thinks  is  a  proof  of  repentance — thinks  again  of  Lancelot : 

"  But  help  me,  heaven,  for  surely  I  repent. 
For  what  is  true  repentance  but  in  thought — 
Not  ev'n  in  inmost  thought  to  think  again 
The  sins  that  made  the  past  so  pleasant  to  us  : 
And  I  have  sworn  never  to  see  him  more, 
To  see  him  more  !  " 

And  ev'n  in  saying  this. 
Her  memory  from  old  habit  of  the  mind 
Went  slipping  back  upon  the  golden  days 
In  which  she  saw  him  first. 

She  paints  that  happy  time  in  a  beautiful  recalling,  her 
long  ride  with  Lancelot  to  meet  the  King,  then  the  meet- 
ing with  Arthur,  and  how  she 


Idylls  of  the  King  363 

sigh'd  to  find 
Her  journey  done,  glanced  at  him,  thou.^ht  him  cold, 
High,  self-contain'd,  and  passionless,  not  like  him, 
"  Not  like  my  Lancelot  !  " 

This  is  not  repentance.  It  is  the  cherishing  of  ancient 
joy.  "  She  grew  half-guilty  in  her  thoughts  again."  At 
this  very  moment  of  crisis  in  the  inward  life  the  King 
rides  to  the  convent  door. 

It  is  well  conceived  by  Tennyson  ;  and  Guinevere, 
hearing  the  King's  step,  falls  prostrate  on  the  floor,  and 
a  voice  speaks  to  her  : 

Monotonous  and  hollow  like  a  ghost's 

Denouncing  judgment,  but,  tho'  changed,  the  King's. 

We  know  that  speech  of  Arthur's,  spoken  by  one  who 
was  going  to  his  death,  and  having  to  the  woman's  ears 
the  weight  and  truth  of  dying  words.  It  tells  her  of  her 
sin  and  the  destruction  she  has  wrought,  and  sternly  : 

"  The  children  born  of  thee  are  sword  and  fire. 
Red  ruin,  and  the  breaking  up  of  laws, 
The  craft  of  kindred,  and  the  godless  hosts 
Of  heathen  swarming  o'er  the  Northern  Sea." 

But  it  also  tells  her  that  he  loves  her  still,  that  he  will 
urge  her  crimes  no  more,  that  he  forgives  as  Eternal 
God  forgives.  He  will  not  touch  her  here  on  earth,  but 
in  the  world  where  all  are  pure  she  will  understand  at 
last,  and  claim  him,  not  Lancelot,  as  her  true  love. 
Farewell,  he  says,  and  he  bends  to  bless  her. 

And  this  breaks  down  the  woman's  long  love  for 
another,  and  at  last  she  loves  Arthur  !     When   she  loves 


364  Tennyson 

him  she  repents,  but  not  till  then.  Guinevere^js  the 
ordinary  woman.  A  strong-hearted  woman,  in  whom 
either  conscience  or  intellect  was  jDowerful,  would  have 
repented  without  loving  Arthur,  or  not  repented  at  all  ; 
but  this  type  of  woman  does  not  really  repent  of  a  sin 
of  this  kind  till  she  loses  love  for  one,  and  finds  herself 
loving  another.  Guinevere  at  last  loves  Arthur,  and  then 
she  has  a  horror  of  herself — but,  since  she  loves  afresh, 
she  is  upborne  on  this  new  delight,  and,  forgetting  the 
past,  looks  forward  to  be  Arthur's  mate  in  heaven.  That 
also  is  characteristic  of  this  ordinary  type.  Her  love 
saves  her,  and  she  passes  into  good  deeds  and  ministrant 
power,  and  in  the  end,  being  Abbess  as  she  has  been 
Queen,  she  died  and  went — 

To  where  beyond  these  voices  there  is  peace. 

Passing  from  Guinevere  to  the  poem  itself,  it  is  neces- 
sary to  repeat  that  it  is  entirely  modern  in  form,  feeling, 
and  thought.  There  is  not  a  trace  in  the  Romances  of 
its  moralities,  of  its  view  of  the  relations  between  Arthur 
and  Guinevere  and  Lancelot,  of  Arthur's  feeling  in  the 
matter  ;  of  its  strict  sense  of  sin  and  of  repentance, 
of  its  careful  insistance  on  the  results  of  Guinevere's 
wrong  on  her  inner  life,  of  a  single  one  of  the 
motives  used  by  Arthur  in  his  last  address  to  Guinevere,* 

*  It  is  true  that,  in  Malory's  book,  Arthur  in  his  fury  condemns 
Guinevere  to  the  stake,  and  would  "  shamefully  slay  "  Sir  Lancelot; 
but  it  is  more  because  their  crime  was  treason  than  immorality. 
Arthur  is  miserable,  not  because  Guinevere  has  been  false,  but  be- 


Idylls  of  the  King  365 

If  we  wish  then  to  live  in  this  poem,  to  feel  and 
understand  Tennyson's  work,  we  must  put  ourselves 
out  of  the  romantic  society  and  into  the  social  and 
ethical  position  that  he  occupies.  To  find  the  power 
and  beauty  of  any  poem,  we  must  breathe  for  the  time 
the  air  the  poet  breathes. 

Some,  however,  attack  this  poem  because  of  this  eth- 
ical direction  ;  and  there  are  places,  certainly,  where  the 
ethical  aim   is   made  too  prominent.     But,  after  all,  the 

cause  he  has  lost  Sir  Lancelot,  the  support  of  his  Round  Table.  He 
regrets  that  he  was  told  of  the  matter.  He  goes  to  war  with  I>ance- 
lot,  not  so  much  to  wreak  his  private  wrong  as  to  satisfy  Sir  Gawain 
whose  brothers  Lancelot  has  slain.  "Alas,"  he  cries,  "that  ever 
this  war  was  begun."  He  bursts  into  tears  of  sorrow,  thinking  on 
Lancelot's  great  courtesy,  when  Lancelot  horses  him  in  a  battle.  He 
falls  sick  with  sorrow.  "  My  lord  King  Arthur,"  says  one  of  his 
knights,  "would  love  Sir  Lancelot,  but  Sir  Gawain  will  not  suffer 
him."  There  is  nothing  in  the  original  story  of  Arthur's  moral  in- 
dignation in  the  Idylls,  That  passage  in  Tennyson  where  Arthur  says 
that  he  holds  the  man  the  worst  of  public  foes  who  lets  the  wife  he 
knows  to  be  false  abide  with  him  and  rule  his  house,  is  utterly  at 
variance  with  the  sentiment  of  the  original.  Arthur  is  there  anxious 
to  have  Guinevere  back,  and  does  receive  her  back  with  honour. 
Moreover  society  and  the  Church  in  the  story  differ  altogether  from 
Tennyson  on  this  point.  When  the  Pope  hears  of  the  war — "  he  con- 
sidering the  great  goodness  of  King  Arthur  and  Sir  Lancelot,  the 
most  noble  Knight  of  the  world,  called  to  him  a  noble  clerk  that  at 
that  time  was  there  present,  which  was  the  Bishop  of  Rochester.  And 
the  Pope  gave  him  bulls,  under  seal,  charging  him,  upon  pain  of 
interdicting  all  England,  that  he  take  his  Queen,  dame  Guinevere, 
to  him  again,  and  accord  with  Sir  Lancelot" — which  Arthur  gladly 
does,  receiving  Guinevere  from  the  hands  of  Lancelot  ;  but  is  driven 
by  Gawain  to  banish  Lancelot,  to  his  great  sorrow.  So  the  Head  of 
the  Church  and  an  English  bishop — and  all  society  agrees  with  them 
— intervene  to  do  that  very  thing  which  Tennyson's  Arthur  declares 
is  deadly  to  public  morality. 


366  Tennyson 

artistic  direction  is  here  the  dominant  direction,  and 
the  ethical  issues,  though  clear,  are  subordinate.  It  is  not 
just  to  say  that  they  override  this  Idyll  ;  and  it  seems  to  me 
that  the  real  things  these  objectors  dislike  is  his  view  of 
the  relation  between  man  and  wife.  To  criticise  the  poem 
from  the  ground  of  that  dislike  has  no  weight  as  art-criti- 
cism. Moreover,  Tennyson  really  felt  passionately  on 
this  matter,  and  this  strong  emotion  of  his  lifts  the  poem 
out  of  ethics  into  art.  We  feel  all  the  strength  and 
intensity  of  his  nature  in  it  ;  personal  feeling  burns  in  it. 
There  are  places  where  the  poem  fails  to  keep  its  full  power, 
not  from  any  original  want  of  deep  feeling,  but  from 
spinning  out  the  emotion  into  too  fine  a  thread.  But  on 
the  whole  the  poem  preserves  a  steady  level  of  moral 
passion  which  is  almost  unique  in  English  poetry.  Never- 
theless, the  ethical  aim,  by  its  very  nature,  and  in  spite 
of  the  poet,  tries  to  get  the  upper  hand,  and  when  it  suc- 
ceeds in  this,  the  poem  instantly  becomes  troubled,  and 
its  power  and  beauty  lose  weight  and  fineness.  It  intrudes, 
for  instance,  into  the  most  important  passage  of  Guine- 
vere, and  injures  the  intensity  and  the  effect  of  the  last 
speech  of  the  King.  Tennyson  makes  Arthur,  at  a  time 
when  personal  feeling  should  be  supreme,  turn  aside  to 
give  a  lecture  on  the  subject  of  national  purity,  and  of 
Guinevere's  destruction  of  his  work  as  a  King.  The 
King  should  have  been  dropped  altogether  and  the  man 
alone  have  spoken.  I  wish,  if  it  be  not  impertinent  to 
do  so,  that  the  whole  of  that  passage  beginning  so  like 
a  sermon. 


Idylls  of  the  King  367 

Bear  with  me  for  the  last  time  while  I  show, 

and  ending  with 

The  mockery  of  my  people  and  their  bane, 

were,  with  the  exception  of  a  few  lines,  left  out  ;  and  I 
wish  also  that  the  other  passage,  beginning 

O  golden  hair,  with  which  I  used  to  play 
Not  knowing, 

and  ending 

So  far,  that  my  doom  is,  I  love  thee  still, 

were  also  expunged.  It  is  too  literal  ;  it  may  be  thought, 
but  not  expressed.  I  do  not  believe  that  the  imagi- 
nation would  have  permitted  it,  if  it  had  not  been  half- 
blinded  by  the  sermon  that  precedes  it.  Both  passages 
are  outside  the  situation  ;  the  first  is  too  much  in  the 
cold,  the  second  too  much  in  the  flesh. 

As  to  literary  criticism,  this  Idyll  is  one  of  the  best  in 
the  book.  I  think  its  form,  as  I  have  already  said,  would 
have  been  better  if  all  the  beginning  of  it,  which  ex- 
plains the  reason  of  Guinevere's  flight  to  Almesbury,  had 
made  part  of  the  previous  Idyll.  We  should  then  be 
wholly  at  Almesbury  with  the  Queen,  and  there  would  be 
a  clearer  unity  of  place  for  the  repose  of  the  imagination. 
But,  putting  that  aside,  this  Idyll  makes  a  full  unity  of 
impression.  We  are  wholly  involved  in  the  fate  of  Guine- 
vere from  the  beginning  to  the  end.  Moreover  we  are 
carried  back  by  two  episodes  which  concern  her,  one  of 


368  Tennyson 

which  is  told  to  her  by  the  maiden,  to  her  earlier 
and  happier  days.  These  do  not  confuse  the  impres- 
sion of  her  sorrowful  fate  and  presence.  They  heighten 
it  by  contrast.  They  bring  her  whole  life  into  the 
narrow  convent  room  and  lay  it  at  the  feet  of  her  pain, 
and  our  pity  for  the  woman,  and  the  moral  impression 
of  her  story,  are  both  deepened. 

These  episodes  are  wrought  out  with  great  beauty  ; 
clearly  invented,  full  of  colour,  life,  and  movement, 
imagined  in  the  air  of  old  Romance,  and  relieving  the 
pity  and  sorrow  of  the  piece  with  the  charm  of  youthful 
love,  and  with  the  gaiety  of  the  elfin  world.  We  see 
through  Guinevere's  soft,  regretful  memory  her  ride  with 
Lancelot  from  her  father's  castle  in  the  sinless  Maytime, 

under  groves  that  look'd  a  paradise 
Of  blossom,  over  sheets  of  hyacinth 
That  seem'd  the  heavens  upbreaking  thro'  the  earth — 

and  we  think  of  Tennyson's  earlier  poem  when  as  yet 
nothing  but  the  thoughtless  delight  of  their  youth  and 
love  engaged  his  mind.  The  next  moment  we  are  borne 
from  this  glad  beginning  to  the  tragic  end,  and  the 
Queen  hears  the  step  of  Arthur  on  the  stair.  The  same 
sharp  contrast  is  made  by  the  story  the  little  maid  tells 
of  the  elfin  rapture  of  the  land  and  all  its  throng  of  life, 
on  the  news  of  Guinevere's  marriage  with  Arthur.  This 
is  a  lovely  tale  of  fairy  gaiety,  as  youthful,  as  much 
enchanted  in  imagination,  as  if  its  writer  were  only  five- 
and-twenty.     The  novice  tells  what  her  father  saw. 


Idylls  of  the  King  369 

He  said 
That  as  he  rode,  an  hour  or  maybe  twain 
After  the  sunset,  down  the  coast,  he  heard 
Strange  music,  and  he  paused,  and  turning — there 
All  down  the  lonely  coast  of  Lyonnesse, 
Each  with  a  beacon-star  upon  his  head. 
And  with  a  wild  sea-light  about  his  feet. 
He  saw  them — headland  after  headland  flame 
Far  on  into  the  rich  heart  of  the  west  : 
And  in  the  light  the  white  mennaiden  swam, 
And  strong  man-breasted  things  stood  fro?",  the  sea, 
And  sent  a  deep  sea-voice  thro'  all  the  land, 
To  which  the  little  elves  of  chasm  and  cleft 
Made  answer,  sounding  like  a  distant  horn. 

There  is  so  much  more,  and  of  equal  life  and  charm  and 
strength  ;  and  then,  right  over  against  this  delightful 
flashing  of  fairyland  in  a  conscience-less  joy,  is  set  the 
gloom  and  sorrow  of  the  present,  and  the  sympathy  of 
Nature  with  it.  The  whole  of  Britain  is  covered  with  a 
pall  of  mist,  the  earth  is  cold  and  dark  beneath  it. 

The  white  mist,  like  a  face-cloth  to  the  face 
Clung  to  the  dead  earth,  and  the  land  was  still. 

Thus,  while  this  happy  story  is  told  within,  the  vapour 

creeps  on  without,  the  symbol  of  the  overwhelming  of 

Arthur's  work  and  life,  and   of  the  guilt  of  Guinevere. 

As  Nature  fitted  herself  to  the  rapture  of  the  beginning, 

so  she  fits  herself  to  the  tragic  end. 

Moreover  this  is  done  by  the  poet  in  preparation  for 

the  next  Idyll,  for  the  last  dim  battle  in  the  west  which 

is  to  be  fought  in  the  death-white  vapour  beside  the 

moaning   sea.     Arthur   is   already  folded  in  that  mist  ; 
24 


370  Tennyson 

his  work  is  drowned  in  it  ;  and  he  fades  away  like  a  gray 
shadow,  no  man  knowing  whether  he  be  dead  or  alive. 
Therefore  in  this  Idyll  we  see  the  King  through  Guine- 
vere's eyes  make  his  departure  in  the  mist — a  noble 
picture,  exalting  the  image  of  the  King  as  warrior  and  as 
lord,  and  vividly  drawn,  as  if  by  Rembrandt,  in  the 
torches  at  the  convent  door. 

And  lo,  he  sat  on  horseback  at  the  door  ! 

And  near  him  the  sad  nuns  with  each  a  light 

Stood,  and  he  gave  them  charge  about  the  Queen, 

To  guard  and  foster  her  for  evermore. 

And  while  he  spake  to  these  his  helm  was  lower'd, 

To  which  for  crest  the  golden  dragon  clung 

Of  Britain  ;  so  she  did  not  see  the  face, 

Which  then  was  as  an  angel's,  but  she  saw. 

Wet  with  the  mists  and  stricken  by  the  lights, 

The  Dragon  of  the  great  Pendragonship 

Blaze,  making  all  the  night  a  stream  of  fire. 

And  even  then  he  turn'd  ;  and  more  and  more 
The  moony  vapour  rolling  round  the  King, 
Who  seem'd  the  phantom  of  a  giant  in  it, 
Enwound  him  fold  by  fold,  and  made  him  gray 
And  grayer,  till  himself  became  as  mist 
Before  her,  moving  ghostlike  to  his  doom. 

That  doom  is  told  in  The  Passing  of  Arthur,  but  that  he 
is  already  enwound  by  its  misty  pall,  and  himself  a  ghost 
in  it,  is  nobly  conceived,  and  as  splendidly  expressed. 

The  Passing  of  Arthur  is  set  over  against  The  Coming 
of  Arthur,  the  epilogue  over  against  the  prologue. 
These  two  are  not  Idylls  in  Tennyson's  idea.  They  are 
the   framework  in  which  the   Idylls  are  contained,  the 


Idylls  of  the  King  371 

coming  and  going  of  the  great  King  whose  character  and 
life  make  the  existence  of  all  the  other  characters  in  the 
book  ;  whose  fate,  from  its  beginning  to  its  end,  makes 
the  unity  and  the  diversity  of  the  book.  In  every  Idyll, 
save  two,  Arthur  is  the  master  of  the  action  of  the  piece 
or  the  final  judge  of  what  has  been  done  ;  or  if  not 
master  or  judge,  the  dominant  figure  to  accomplish 
whose  destiny  the  doings  in  the  Idyll  have  occurred. 
Even  in  Merlin  and  Vivien  and  in  Pcllcas  and Ettarre^  he 
broods  like  a  shadow  over  the  events.  We  are  forced  to 
ask  in  the  first  what  will  happen  to  him  and  his  work 
when  he  is  deprived  of  his  great  councillor,  the  only  one 
who  knew  his  inmost  soul  ;  and  Tennyson,  with  great 
skill,  drives  us  into  asking  that  question.  In  Pelleas  and 
Ettarre  enough  is  said  of  him  to  force  us  to  realise  the 
dreadful  fate  which  overhangs  his  work.  We  see  him 
there,  like  Abdiel  among  the  rebel  host,  the  only  one 
who  still  loves  the  great  Virtues  and  the  pursuit  of  per- 
fect duty  in  a  world  which  loves  vice  as  he  loves  virtue, 
and  which  worships  the  material  as  he  worships  the  ideal 
life.  He  scarcely  enters  into  the  action  of  the  piece, 
but  he  is,  nevertheless,  vividly  present,  standing  in  the 
background  alone,  wrapt  in  his  fate  as  in  a  cloak. 

This  dominance  of  one  central  figure  towards  whom 
converges  all  the  action  as  well  as  all  the  personages  of 
the  poem,  is  that  which  gives  it  unity,  and  supplies  it 
with  whatever  epic  character  it  has.  The  Idylls  of  the 
King,  as  a  whole,  borders  on  the  epic  ;  it  is  not  an 
epic.     Its  form  forbids  us  to  call  it  by  that  name,  and  I 


372  Tennyson 

suppose  that  Tennyson,  feeling  that,  gave  ii  ilie  name  of 
the  Idylls  of  the  King.  Nevertheless,  the  idea  of  its  be- 
coming an  epic  was  originally  in  his  mind,  and  influenced 
his  later  work  upon  the  whole  poem.  He  hovered,  that 
is,  between  two  forms  of  his  art,  and  this  apparent  chang- 
ing, here  and  there  as  he  wrote,  of  the  class  of  poetry  in 
which  the  work  was  placed,  vaguely  troubles  the  reader. 
That  iinity  of  specialised  impression  which  should  at 
once  tell  a  reader  to  what  kind  of  poetry  the  poem 
belongs,  is  not  here. 

Again,  the  proper  end  of  an  epic  is  the  moral  triumph 
of  the  hero  over  fate,  over  the  attack  of  time,  and  over 
pain.  He  may  be  beaten  into  the  dust,  all  but  ruined  by 
life  ;Jbut  his  soul  is  not  subdued.  He  emerges  clear,  like 
Arcturus  after  a  night  of  storm,  purified,  almost  equal  in 
calm  to  the  immortal  Gods.  Conquered  without,  he  is 
conqueror  within.  Even  Fate  retires,  saying  :  "  This 
man  is  greater  than  I."  Even  the  Furies  become  the 
Eumenides.  In  the  true  epic  this  is  always  the  position 
of  the  hero  at  the  close.  It  is  the  position  of  Adam,  it 
is  that  of  Dante,  of  yEneas,  of  Achilles.  It  is  not  alto- 
gether, only  partly,  the  position  of  Arthur.  He  passes 
away,  it  is  true  into  the  land  beyond,  tended  by  the 
Queens.  There  is  a  vague  rumour  that  he  will  return,  but 
no  one  knows.  Ignorance,  doubt,  dimly  lit  at  rare  times 
by  faith,  enshroud  his  fate.  His  kingdom,  he  thinks,  will 
reel  back  into  the  beast.  This  is  not  the  true  end,  nor 
the  feeling,  of  an  epic  hero. 

A.ttJ^^^'l-'^^oi^.-t'^'S-^^^l^^^-     ^-'Ove,  friendshijj,  liis  ideal 


Idylls  of  the  King  373 

— have  also  broken  down.  That  fate  might  belong  to 
the  epic  hero,  but  that  which  could  not,  in  an  epic 
belong  to  him,  is  the  breaking  down  of  Arthur's  soul. 
He  has  no  clear  faith  in  moral  victory,  or  in  the  Gods 
being,  beyond  our  follies  and  our  pain,  the  masters  of 
right  and  love.  Such  was  the  faith  of  CEdipus  at  Co- 
lonus,  in  that  Trilogy  which  is  so  near  an  epic  in  feeling. 
Such  is  the  faith  of  Achilles,  of  ^neas,  of  Adam,  in  the 
great  epics.  The  epic  heroes  always  issue  forth  from 
YltW,  a  rweder  le  sttile  ;  and  from  their  Purgatory, /«/-^ 
e  disposto  a  salire  alle  stelle. 

This  faith  does  not  pervade  or  close  the  Idylls.  The 
steady  belief  of  In  Alemoriam  in  the  certainty  of  the 
end  being  good,  and  of  the  value,  therefore,  of  all 
human  effort,  is  gone  from  the  Idylls  of  the  Khig.  I 
suppose  that  the  sceptical  trouble  of  the  confused  and 
wavering  time  during  which  the  Idylls  were  written  had 
now  stolen  into  Tennyson.  He  did  not  become,  judg- 
ing from  this  poem  alone,  altogether  a  pessimist.  He 
was  too  much  of  a  prophet  to  be  altogether  that  lifeless 
personage.  But  he  drifted  frequently  towards  that 
position,  and  then  drifted  back  again.  And  the  Idylls  0/ 
the  :^ng  represent  this  wavering  between  hope  and 
despondency,  between  faith  and  unfaith  in  either  God 
or  man.  Their  writer,  if  we  judge  from  this  poem 
alone,  and  from  the  fate  he  allots  allegorically  to  Arthur, 
did  not  know  at  this  time  where  he  was,  nor  what  he  be- 
lieved, nor  what  he  disbelieved,  but,  on  the  whole,  flung 
himself  at  last  on  prayer.   Even  that  conclusion  belongs  to 


374  Tennyson 

the  earlier  poem.  The  beginning  of  The  Passing  of 
Arthur  places  Arthur  in  a  condition  which  is  best  ex- 
pressed by  one  line  in  In  Memoriam  : 

And  vaguely  trust  the  larger  hope. 
I  give  the  passage  : 

I  found  Him  in  the  shining  of  the  stars, 
I  mark'd  Him  in  the  flowering  of  His  fields. 
But  in  His  ways  with  men  I  find  Him  not, 
I  waged  His  wars,  and  now  I  pass  and  die. 
O  me  !  for  why  is  all  around  us  here 
As  if  some  lesser  god  had  made  the  world, 
But  had  not  force  to  shape  it  as  he  would. 
Till  the  High  God  behold  it  from  beyond, 
And  enter  it,  and  make  it  beautiful  ? 
Or  else  as  if  the  world  were  wholly  fair, 
But  that  these  eyes  of  men  are  dense  and  dim. 
And  have  not  power  to  see  it  as  it  is  : 
Perchance,  because  we  see  not  to  the  close  ; — 
For  I,  being  simple,  thought  to  work  His  will. 
And  have  but  stricken  with  the  sword  in  vain  ; 
And  all  whereon  I  lean'din  wife  and  friend 
Is  traitor  to  my  peace,  and  all  my  realm 
Reels  back  into  the  beast  and  is  no  more. 
My  God,  Thou  hast  forgotten  me  in  my  death  : 
Nay — God  my  Christ — I  pass  but  shall  not  die. 

Doubt,  and  all  its  trouble  !  Unable  to  affirm  or  deny 
anything  !  No  clear  belief,  no  triumph  of  the  soul  ! 
And  the  last  battle  is  fought  in  a  death-white  mist,  not 
one  ray  of  sunlight  to  illumine  it  !  Men  know  not 
friend  from  foe  ;  old  ghosts  look  in  on  the  fight  ;  every 
man  who  fought  in  it  fought  with  his  heart  cold 

With  formless  fear  ;  and  ev'n  on  Arthur  fell 
Confusion,  since  he  saw  not  whom  he  fought. 


Idylls  of  the  King  375 

I  remember  the  years  in  which  these  lines  were  written, 
and  the  temper  of  society,  and  they  describe  that  temper 
with  a  great  imagination.  iLwas  a  time  when  every  be- 
lief  was  challenged,  when  society  had  almost  ceased  to 
hope  or  believe  in  the  future  even  of  man  on  the  earthy  7; 
and  when  political  and  social  ideas  which  prophesied 
the  advent  of  a  more  unselfish  world  were  laughed  at  as 
unpra.ctical.  Moreover  those  ideas  were  then  only  to  be 
found  in  a  vague  form  among  the  working  classes,  of 
whose  life  and  hopes  and  struggle  Tennyson  knew  noth- 
ing. Few  then  kept  their  faith,  whether  in  God  and 
Man,  or  in  Man  alone  ;  few  were  bold  enough  to  believe 
that  the  confusion  was  not  the  prelude  to  decay  but  the 
turmoil  that  precedes  a  new  birth,  and  Tennyson  was 
not  one  of  these.  He  was  in  one  part  of  his  nature,  and 
judging  from  his  poetry  alone,  too  much  the  product  of 
the  Universities,  too  much  in  the  society  which  is  called 
cultured,  too  apart  from  the  surgings  of  the  people,  too 
much  in  harbour — to  be  able  in  the  midst  of  the  con- 
fusion to  see  the  great  order,  in  the  midst  of  the  battle 
to  be  sure  of  the  victory.  At  other  times,  and  in  another 
part  of  his  nature,  whenever  he  yielded  himself  wholly  to 
the  pure  Muse  within  him,  and  did  not  bring  his  impulse 
to  the  tribunal  of  the  understanding  for  criticism,  he 
escapes  into  that  land  of  faith  where  the  sun  shines  on 
the  glory  which  shall  be,  and,  doubting  no  more,  proph- 
esies clear  good  ;  but  this,  which  is  true  of  the  time  when 
he  wrote  In  Meffion'am,  and  also  of  his  old  age  when  the 
epic  of  his  life  closed  in   a  liero's  victory,  is  not  true  of 


376  Tennyson 

the  period  when  he  wrote  the  beginning  of  The  Passing 
of  Arthur,  nor  indeed,  as  I  think,  of  the  whole  of  the 
period  of  the  composition  of  the  Idylls  of  the  King. 
These  were  the  days  of  his  dim  battle  in  the  mist.  And 
perhaps  this  trouble  was  all  the  worse  for  him,  because 
the  audacities,  the  reckless  hopes,  the  faiths  which  be- 
lieve without  seeing,  the  keen  contempt  for  any  society 
which  says  "  All  is  wrong  or  going  wrong,"  or,  '*  I  can- 
not tell  whether  all  is  wrong  or  right,"  were  not  his  dowry 
as  a  poet.  Even  when  Arthur  is  carried  away  over  the 
mere  to  Avalon,  and  when  he  cries  back  to  Bedivere — in 
the  part  of  the  poem  which  was  published  in  1842 — that 
prayer  has  power  with  God,  he  says  : 

For  all  my  mind  is  clouded  with  a  doubt. 

I  do  not  press  that  line,  however,  into  my  statement,  for 
it  may  be  merely  a  suggestion  of  the  vagueness  of 
Arthur's  fate,  of  which  we  are  left  ignorant  in  the 
Romances  ;  but  it,  with  all  the  rest,  fits  in  to  prove  the 
point  with  which  I  began  and  to  which  I  now  return, 
that  Arthur  is  not  an  epic  hero,  and  that  this  poem  can- 
not be  called  an  epic.  Tennyson  did  not  call  it  so,  but 
others  have.  The  epic  hero  must  have  a  clear  moral 
victory  and  be  purified  into  clearness,  and  this  is  not  the 
case  with  Arthur. 

I  turn  now  to  Arthur  himself  as  conceived  by  Tenny- 
son. First,  it  must  be  understood  that  Tennyson's 
Arthur  has  even  less  to  do  with  the  Arthur  of  the  Ro- 
mances than  his  Lancelot  has  with  the  romantic  Lan- 


Idylls  of  the  King  377 

celot.  The  moral  or  even  the  social  atmosphere  of  the 
Arthur  of  chivalry  is  not  the  atmosphere  which  Ten- 
nyson's Arthur  breathes.  Again  I  recur  to  the  primal 
fault  of  form,  which  belongs  to  the  whole  poem.  The 
Arthur  in  Tennyson's  mind,  and  the  Arthur  of  tlic 
romantic  era,  are  linked  together  by  an  unnatural  tic, 
and  the  two  often  quarrel.  Most  of  the  objections 
made  against  Arthur  have  their  real  root  in  this.  They 
are  objections  rather  against  the  form  than  against  the 
poem.  But,  on  the  whole,  Arthur  as  the  modern  gentle- 
man, as  the  modern  ruler  of  men,  such  a  ruler  as  one  of 
our  Indian  heroes  on  the  frontier,  is  the  main  tiling  in 
Tennyson's  mind,  and  his  conception  of  such  a  man 
contains  his  ethical  lesson  to  his  countrymen. 

As  to  Arthur  the  King,  he  is  a  man  who  has  the 
power  of  sending  his  own  soul  into  the  soul  of  his  fol- 
lowers, and  making  them  his  own — images  of  himself — 
and  this  is  the  power  of  a  born  ruler  of  men.  It  is 
the  one-man  power,  that  power  of  which  Carlyle  as 
well  as  Tennyson  made  too  much — because  the  secret 
of  the  progress  of  mankind,  a  secret  the  true  ruler 
should  understand,  does  not  lie  in  one  great  individu- 
ality devouring  all  other  individualities  and  making 
them  into  his  pattern,  but  in  his  so  sacrificing  his  nat- 
ural mastery  as  to  develop  into  vividness  the  individual 
forces  of  all  the  characters  he  governs.  Carlyle  never 
saw  that  truth,  nor  Ruskin,  nor  Tennyson.  But  Tenny- 
son, though  he  often  preached  this  one-man  theory,  does 
not  hold  it  fast.     It  seems  to  have  crept  into  his  mind — 


^yS  Tennyson 

wavering  hither  and  thither  on  many  subjects  during 
the  years  in  which  he  wrote  the  /(fy//s — that  this  theory 
did  not  hold  water  in  practice.  For,  though  Arthur 
imposes  his  character  at  first  on  all  his  knights,  they  all 
glide  away  from  him.  Their  separate  individualities 
assert  themselves,  and  assert  themselves  in  reaction 
from  the  foreign,  overmastering,  and  exalted  personality 
of  Arthur.  In  fact,  Tennyson  represents  in  the  Idylls, 
whether  consciously  or  not,  the  complete  breaking  down 
in  practice  of  the  theory  of  the  heaven-born  ruler  who 
makes  every  one  into  his  own  pattern.  I  do  not  think 
he  meant  to  give  us  this  good  democratic  lesson,  but  he 
has  given  it. 

Another  part  of  the  conception  of  Arthur  as  ruler,  is 
that  with  which  all  the  ethical  writers,  whether  of  his- 
tory or  fiction,  have,  during  the  last  fifty  years,  made  us 
familiar  ;  and  which  many  Englishmen,  sent  to  our  far 
dependencies,  have  illustrated  by  their  lives.  Arthur  is 
the  clearer  of  the  waste  places  of  the  earth,  the  driver 
forth  of  the  cruel  beast  and  the  lawless  man,  he  w-ho  lets 
in  the  light  and  air,  the  doer  of  stern  justice,  the  de- 
liverer of  the  oppressed,  the  organiser  of  law  and  order, 
the  welder  together  of  all  the  forces  of  the  kingdom  into 
a  compact  body  for  right  and  against  wrong,  the  builder 
of  great  cities  and  noble  architecture,  the  teacher  of 
agriculture,  the  maker  of  roads  and  water-ways,  the 
Culture  Hero,  as  the  Folklorists  would  call  him  ;  and, 
finally,  the  great  warrior  who,  though  he  does  not  excel 
the  rest  of  his  men  in  courage,  excels  them  all  as  leader 


Idylls  of  the  King  379 

of  the  battle.  On  all  this  there  is  nothing  particular 
to  say.     It  is  the  general,  the  well-known  conception. 

The  rest  of  the  conception  of  Arthur  as  King  is  as 
the  moral  lawgiver,  and  chiefly  as  the  demander  of 
chasity.  It  is  on  the  breaking  of  the  law  of  purity  that 
he  most  insists  to  Guinevere  as  the  cause  of  the  ruin  of 
his  aims  and  of  his  Order.  His  knights  may  love — nay, 
nothing  so  well  makes  a  man  as  the  maiden  passion  for 
a  maid.  His  knights  may  marry  :  life  finds  its  crown 
in  a  true  marriage.  But  only  one  maiden  is  to  be  loved, 
and  wedded  man  and  woman  must  live  only  for  each 
other.  And  we  have  seen  that  this  is  Tennyson's 
opinion.     All  his  poetry  is  full  of  it.  / 

Yet,  he  makes  the  whole  effort  utterly  break  down, 
and  I  do  not  comprehend  his  position.  I  sometimes 
think  that  the  hopelessness  of  the  years  in  which  he 
wrote  the  Idylls  seized  upon  him,  and  he  ceased  for  a 
time  to  believe  in  the  victory  of  good.  For  it  is  not 
only  the  partial  failure  of  purity  of  life  which  he  repre- 
sents in  the  Idylls  ;  it  is  its  complete  overthrow.  Every 
one,  with  the  exception  of  Arthur,  Percivale,  his  sister, 
and  Sir  Bors,  becomes  unchaste.  I  sometimes  think 
that  he  wished  to  illustrate  the  truth  that  vows  imposed 
from  without  were  not  only  useless  when  the  character 
remained  unchanged,  but  that  they  drove  men  and 
women  into  their  opposites  ;  and  perhaps  that  his 
hatred  of  monkery  influenced  him  further  in  this  di- 
rection ;  but  the  astonishing  result  to  which  he  comes 
is  more    than    these   motives   should    produce.     Not  a 


380  Tennyson 

soul  keeps  the  vows,  except  Arthur  and  those  who  have 
left  the  world  for  the  cloister.  I  do  not  understand  why 
he  works  out  a  result  which  seems  not  only  to  contra- 
dict the  possibility  of  his  rule  of  chastity  being  observed, 
l)ut  which  makes  that  rule  issue  in  a  wholly  shameless 
society.  It  is  as  if  he  despaired  of  purity.  The  thing 
he  most  insists  on  is  made  by  him  to  be  the  impossible 
thing.  This  is  an  excessively  curious  conclusion  for 
Tennyson  to  come  to. 

Every  one  in  the  Idylls,  save  the  few  I  have  mentioned, 
thinks  this  vow  too  much  for  mortal  man.  Merlin  says 
that  no  one  can  keep  it.  Vivien  and  Mark,  of  course, 
laugh  it  to  scorn.  Guinevere  declares  it  to  be  impossi- 
ble, and  Lancelot  knows  it.  Gawain  openly  adopts 
unchastity.  Pelleas  says  that  the  King  has  made  his 
knights  fools  and  liars  ;  Tristram,  that  he  himself  had 
sworn  but  by  the  shell,  that  the  strict  vow  snaps  itself, 
that  flesh  and  blood  were  sure  to  violate  it. 

Bind  me  to  one  ?     The  wide  world  laughs  at  it. 

Why  does  Tennyson,  we  wonder,  make  almost  all  his 
characters  think  chastity  impossible  ? 

Then,  he  even  goes  further.  The  condition  of  society 
in  the  court  and  country  set  forth  in  Pelleas  and  Ettarre 
and  in  The  Last  Tournament  is  incredibly  bad.  Every 
woman  is  unchaste  and  every  man.  Ettarre  is  as  im- 
moral as  Tristram,  and  both  far  more  so  than  they  are 
in  the  original  tales.  Rome  in  its  decadence,  France 
under  the  Regent,  were  not  so  wholly  evil  as   Arthur's 


Idylls  of  the   King  381 

court,  with  the  sole  exception  of  Arthur,  The  poet 
proves  too  much.  Arthur's  effort  is  too  ghastly  a  failure. 
And  the  representation  of  this  result — unless  we  fall 
back  on  the  needs  of  tlie  allegory  for  an  explanation — 
is  not  in  the  interests  of  morality.  Tennyson  does  not 
really — in  this  working  out  of  his  moral  aim — strengthen 
the  will  to  be  chaste,  but  weakens  it.  The  chief  thing 
that  appears  is  that  chastity  is  an  impossibility.  Tenny- 
son cannot,  of  course,  have  meant  this  ;  but  his  art 
ought  to  have  saved  him  from  the  possibility  of  its  infer- 
ence. Had  he  been  less  ethical  and  less  allegorical,  he 
would  not  have  fallen  into  this  artistic  error. 

There  are  better  things  to  say  when  we  think  of 
Tennyson's  conception  of  Arthur  as  a  man — as  the 
"  very  perfect  knight."  We  have  a  part  of  the  charac- 
ter he  meant  to  represent  in  the  dedication  to  the  Idylls 
of  the  King^  where  he  compares  his  Arthur  to  Prince 
Albert. 

And  indeed  he  seems  to  me 
Scarce  other  than  my  King's  ideal  knight, 
"  Who  reverenced  his  conscience  as  his  king  ; 
Whose  glory  was,  redressing  human  wrong  ; 
Who  spake  no  slander,  no,  nor  listen 'd  to  it ; 
Who  loved  one  only  and  who  clave  to  her — " 

But  Arthur  is  more  than  that.  He  is  not  only  faith- 
ful to  his  wife,  he  is  as  faithful  in  friendship  as  in  love. 
Affection  of  any  kind  once  given  is  always  given.  His 
chastity  is  as  perfect  as  Galahad's,  within  the  bounds  of 
marriage.  His  honour  is  unstained,  and  no  passion  of 
whatever   force  has  power  to   make   him  waver  from  its 


382  Tennyson 

call.  His  word,  once  passed,  is  passed  for  ever.  He  is 
so  true  that  he  cannot  believe  in  untruthfulness,  so  faith- 
ful that  he  is  unsuspicious  of  unfaithfulness.  What  is 
right  and  just  to  do  he  does,  though  all  the  world  fall  to 
ruin  round  him.  His  moral  courage  is  as  great  as  his 
physical  courage.  He  can  rise  into  a  white  heat  of 
wrath  or  love  ;  but  he  is  not  led  away  by  false  or  fleet- 
ing heats  of  feeling  into  folly  or  intemperance.  Add 
to  this  absolute  courtesy,  gentleness,  pity,  forgiveness 
for  the  fallen,  unselfish  joy  in  the  fame  and  glory  of 
others,  and  we  see  the  perfect  knight  of  Tennyson.  It 
is  confessedly  an  ideal,  but  an  ideal  to  which  the  poet 
desired  us  to  aspire,  and  to  gain  which  he  thought  pos- 
sible. This  ideal  has  been  the  object  of  many  critical 
attacks,  or,  to  put  it  more  justly,  Arthur  has  been  depre- 
ciated as  a  man  with  various  mockeries.  I  need  not 
particularise  them.  They  have  been  about  us  for  a  long 
time  in  reviews,  in  society,  among  men  and  women  who 
call  themselves  emancipated,  and  the  question  is  :  "  Is 
there  any  truth  at  the  bottom  of  this  irritation  against 
the  character  of  Arthur  ?  " 

If  the  irritation  be  directed  against  those  parts  of  his 
character  on  which  I  have  now  dwelt,  against  this  ideal 
of  a  knight,  then  it  is  not  only  a  false  irritation,  but  it 
also  speaks  ill  for  the  society  which  is  afflicted  by  it. 
Tennyson  has  drawn  in  Arthur  that  which  every  man 
ought  to  wish  to  be.  The  qualities  of  Arthur  would, 
when  vital  in  our  lives,  make  our  society  noble  and  lov- 
ing, magnanimous  and  magnificent.      The  whole  world 


Idylls  of  the  King 


v)"j 


ought  to  be  better  for  this  picture  of  a  man,  and  the 
future  will  be  grateful  to  Tennyson  for  it.  On  this  side 
of  the  matter  these  critics  are  not  to  be  trusted. 

But  is  there  no  side  on  which  Arthur  fails,  on  which  he 
makes  a  not  quite  human  impression,  a  part  of  the  pict- 
ure in  decrying  which  the  critics  have  some  reason  ? 
Yes,  there  is — but  they  have  no  cause  to  boast  themselves 
of  their  acumen.  What  they  say  is  not  original.  Ten- 
nyson himself  has  said  it  by  the  mouth  of  Guinevere, 
and  it  appears  in  the  sayings  of  even  the  Knights  of 
Arthur — of  Gawain  and  Tristram,  much  more  in  the 
sayings  of  Vivien  and  of  Mark.  There  is  scarcely  a 
single  attack  made  by  the  critics  on  Arthur  which  has 
not  been  made  by  Tennyson  himself.  In  fact,  Arthur  is 
a  little  superhuman,  a  little  too  out  of  the  world,  a  little 
too  easily  deceived,  a  little  too  good  for  human  nature's 
daily  food,  Tennyson  made  him  so,  and  deliberately. 
"  Why  ?  "  we  ask  ;  "  there  was  no  need.  He  would 
have  had  even  more  force  as  an  ideal  character,  even 
more  influence  on  us,  if  he  had  shared  more  in  our 
humanity.     Why  did  Tennyson  superhumanise  him?" 

The  real  reason  lay  in  the  necessities  of  that  allegory 
which  Tennyson  chose  to  infiltrate  into  his  poem.  He 
represents  Arthur  as  a  man,  and  when  he  does  so,  even 
when  he  makes  him  ideal  in  conduct  and  aim,  the  char- 
acter is  just  and  clear  and  human.  But  he  is  forced  by 
his  allegory  to  paint  him  also  as  the  rational  soul,  as  an 
abstract  idea,  and  whenever  he  does  this  Arthur  steps 
outside  of  humanity,  and  that  is  naturally  resented.     At 


384  Tennyson 

all  the  points  where  Arthur  represents  the  soul  alone, 
Guinevere  and  the  critics  are  right.  He  does  want 
colour  and  warmth,  he  is  too  much  outside  of  the  world  ; 
he  is  under-passioned,  if  I  may  coin  a  word  ;  and  the 
demands  of  his  perfection  do  not  sufficiently  consider 
the  weakness  of  human  nature.  He  loses  life,  and  be- 
comes, in  his  allegorical  form,  the  image  only  of  a  man. 
But  because  Tennyson  was  unfortunate  enough  as  an 
artist  to  trouble  his  poem  by  making  his  chief  character 
not  only  a  man  but  an  allegorical  symbol,  we  have  no 
right  to  transfer  our  impatience  with  the  characteristics  of 
the  unhuman  symbol  to  the  ideal  character  of  the  man. 
Let  us  keep  them  separate.  Nevertheless  the  artist 
ought  not  to  have  given  us  this  trouble — ought  not  to 
have  mixed  up  the  man  with  the  general  notion  of  the 
soul  of  man.  Arthur  ought  either  to  have  been  one 
thing  or  the  other — either  the  rational  Soul  alone,  or  the 
man  alone  ;  not  sometimes  one  and  sometimes  the  other. 
And  in  this  Fassi?ig  of  Arthur  he  is  so  much  the  man 
and  so  little  of  the  Soul  that  he  pleases  more  than  else- 
where in  the  book.  Even  in  the  great  speech  to  Guine- 
vere in  the  last  Idyll,  the  portions  of  it  which  are  spoken 
by  the  King  as  the  Soul  in  man  contending  with  sense, 
lessen  the  humanity  of  those  parts  of  it  which  are  spoken 
from  the  man  to  the  woman. 

But  here  in  this  Passing  of  Arthur  he  is  altogether  the 
man,  and  he  is  dear  to  us  throughout.  He  feels  his  fail- 
ure in  the  great  work  he  desired  to  do  with  the  same  self- 
pitifulness  that  many  a  high  reformer  has  felt  in  the  hour 


Idylls  of  the-   King  -^g^ 

of  his  death.  I  have  already  quoted  the  lines.  They 
are  full  of  humanity.  They  are  not  the  voice  of  an 
abstract  soul.     And  their  wild  cry  at  the  end  : 

My  God,  Thou  hast  forgotten  me  in  my  death  ! 

is  changed  suddenly,  as  many  a  prophet's  has  been 
changed,  into  a  cry  of  trust  concerning  his  personal 

fate. 

Nay — God,  my  Christ — I  pass  but  shall  not  die. 

Then,  like  many  another  leader  of  men,  he  dreams  on 
the  day  before  he  dies — and  the  ghost  of  Gawain,  blown 

Along  a  wandering  wind,  and  past  his  ear 
Went  shrilling,  "  Hollow,  hollow,  all  delight ! 
Hail,  King  !  to-morrow  thou  shalt  pass  away. 
Farewell !  there  is  an  isle  of  rest  for  thee." 

And  the  shrill  voice  fades  away,  likened  in  a  noble  simile 
to 

wild  birds  that  change 

Their  season  in  the  night  and  wail  their  way 

From  cloud  to  cloud  ; 

and  is  imaginatively  mingled  with  dim  cries  as  of  a  city 

sacked  at  night,  and  Arthur  wakes  and  thinks,  like  a 

poet,  that  all  the  Faery  things  that  haunt  the  waste  and 

wild  mourn  :  for,  when  he  goes,  they  too  will  go. 

This  also  is  human  to  the  core,  and  when,  mournfully 

saying  that  to  fight  against  his  people  is  to  fight  against 

himself,  and  that  their  death  is  a  death-stroke  to  him, 

he   feels  the  love  of  his  youth  recur  and  its  late  misery 

darken  the  whole  world,  so  that  the  mist  in  which  he 
25 


386  Tennyson 

moves  is  made  less  by  Nature  than  by  his  own  sorrow 
for  Guinevere  : 

This  blind  haze 

which  ever  since  I  saw 
One  lying  in  the  dust  at  Almesbury, 
Hath  folded  in  the  passes  of  the  world, 

he  is  still  more  one  with  whom  we  can  feel  as  man  to 
man.  Then  comes  that  noble  passage  of  the  fight  in 
the  dead  mist  upon  the  ocean-shore,  on  the  sunset 
bound  of  Lyonnesse — in  which  the  allegory  recurs,  but 
splendidly  recurs,  in  veiled  words  which  describe  the 
whole  battle  of  desperate  humanity  for  life  and  faith 
and  hope  in  the  midst  of  its  chill  mystery — till  with  the 
falling  night  the  North  wind  rose  and  the  tide  ;  the  mist 
dissolved,  and  Arthur  saw  none  alive  around  him  but 
Bedivere  and  the  traitor  Modred.  A  great  voice  then 
shakes  the  world — a  noble  imagination  of  Tennyson — 
and  seems  to  waste  the  realm,  and  to  beat  confusion 
into  Arthur's  heart : 

I  know  not  what  I  am, 
Nor  whence  I  am,  nor  whether  I  be  King. 
Behold,  I  seem  but  King  among  the  dead. 

This,  too,  may  be  allegory,  but  the  human  element 
in  it  is  stronger  than  the  allegorical,  and  it  goes  home 
to  the  heart  of  the  situation.  Afterwards,  in  one  last 
act  of  kinghood,  when  he  slays  the  traitorous  cause  of 
all  the  woe,  he  passes  for  a  moment  out  of  his  confusion 
into  the  full  sense  of  his  kinghood,  of  whom  he  is,  and 


Idylls  of  the  King  387 

whence  he  has  come,  and  whither  he  is  going.  This  is 
the  fate  of  a  man  and  the  heart  of  a  man,  and  after  all 
our  ethics  and  allegory,  it  is  sweet  and  true  to  company 
with  it. 

And  then  we  enter  into  the  old  and  beloved  piece  of 
poetry  which  we  know  so  well — into  the  Alorte  d Arthur^ 
which  we  read  first  in  1842.  It  is  led  up  to  so  well  that 
we  feel  that  the  hand  and  heart  that  wrote  it  so  many 
years  ago  have  not  failed  in  skill  and  the  power  to 
charm,  that  time  has  not  robbed  the  poet  of  his  lyre- 
playing.  But  when,  being  led  up  to  it,  we  suddenly  find 
ourselves  in  it,  as  in  a  land  which  of  old  we  found 
lovely  and  rejoice  to  see  it  again,  we  are  full  of  our 
earlier  happiness. 

When  first  we  read  it,  it  seemed  as  if  Romance,  sitting 
ever  young  by  her  wild  forest  stream,  were  stretching 
out  her  arms,  and  bidding  us  leave  this  weary  world  for 
her  delights.  And  when  we  read  it  again  the  ancient 
charm  returns.  For  here,  in  this  chivalric  work,  we  are 
close  throughout  to  the  ancient  tale.  No  allegory,  no 
ethics,  no  rational  Soul,  no  preaching  symbolism,  enter 
here,  to  dim,  confuse,  or  spoil  the  story.  Nothing  is 
added  which  does  not  justly  exalt  the  tale,  and  what  is 
added  is  chiefly  a  greater  fulness  and  breadth  of  human- 
ity, a  more  lovely  and  supreme  Nature,  arranged  at 
every  point  to  enhance  into  keener  life  the  human  feel- 
ings of  Arthur  and  his  knight,  to  lift  the  ultimate  hour 
of  sorrow  and  of  death  into  nobility.  Arthur  is  borne 
to  a  chapel  nigh  the  field — 


^88  Tennyson 

A  broken  chancel  with  a  broken  cross, 
That  stood  on  a  dark  strait  of  barren  land  ; 
On  one  side  lay  the  Ocean,  and  on  one 
Lay  a  great  water,  and  the  moon  was  full. 

What  a  noble  framework — and  with  what  noble  con- 
ciseness it  is  drawn  !  And  Arthur  bids  Bedivere  take 
Excalibur,  and  throw  it  into  the  mere.  Twice  he  leaves 
the  King  to  throw  it,  and  twice  he  hides  it,  thinking  it 
shame  to  deprive  the  world  of  so  glorious  a  sword.  All 
the  landscape — than  which  nothing  better  has  been  in- 
vented by  any  English  poet — lives  from  point  to  point 
as  if  Nature  herself  had  created  it  ;  but  even  more  alive 
than  the  landscape  are  the  two  human  figures  in  it — Sir 
Bedivere  standing  by  the  great  water,  and  Arthur  lying 
wounded  near  the  chapel,  waiting  for  his  knight.  Take 
one  passage,  which  to  hear  is  to  see  the  thing : 

So  saying,  from  the  ruin'd  shrine  he  stept, 
And  in  the  moon  athwart  the  place  of  tombs, 
Where  lay  the  mighty  bones  of  ancient  men. 
Old  knights,  and  over  them  the  sea-wind  sang 
Shrill,  chill,  with  flakes  of  foam.     He,  stepping  down 
By  zigzag  paths,  and  juts  of  pointed  rock. 
Came  on  the  shining  levels  of  the  lake. 

Twice  he  hides  the  sword,  and  when  Arthur  asks  : 
"  What  hast  thou  seen,  what  heard  ? "  Bedivere  an- 
swers :  * 

*  The  second  answer  is  changed — 

I  heard  the  water  lapping  on  the  crag. 
And  the  long  ripple  washing  in  the  reeds. 

Both  of  them  have  the  modem  note,  especially  in  the  adjectives ; 
but  though  they  lose  simplicity,  they  gain  splendour.     The  words  in 


Idylls  of  the  King  389 

I  heard  the  ripple  washing  in  the  reeds. 
And  the  wild  water  lapping  on  the  crag. 

— lines  so  steeped  in  the  loneliness  of  mountain  tarns 
that  I  never  stand  in  solitude  beside  their  waters  but  I 
hear  the  verses  in  my  heart.  At  the  last  he  throws  it. 
The  great  brand 

Made  lightnings  in  the  splendour  of  the  moon, 

And  flashing  round  and  round,  and  whirl'd  in  an  arch, 

Shot  like  a  streamer  of  the  northern  morn, 

Seen  where  the  moving  isles  of  winter  shock 

By  night,  with  noises  of  the  Northern  Sea. 

"  So  flashed  and  fell  the  brand  Excalibur,"  and  never 
yet  in  poetry  did  any  sword,  flung  in  the  air,  flash  so 
superbly. 

The  rest  of  the  natural  description  is  equally  alive, 
and  the  passage  where  the  sound  echoes  the  sense,  and 
Bedivere,  carrying  Arthur,  clangs  as  he  moves  along  the 
icy  rocks,  is  as  clear  a  piece  of  ringing,  smiting,  clashing 
sound  as  any  to  be  found  in  Tennyson  : 

Dry  clash'd  his  harness  in  the  icy  caves 
And  barren  chasms,  and  all  to  left  and  right 
The  bare  black  cliff  clang'd  round  him,  as  he  based 
His  feet  on  j  .'.s  of  slippery  crag  that  rang 
Sharp-smitten  with  the  dint  of  armed  heels. 

We  hear  all  the  changes  on  the  vowel  a — every  sound 
of  it  used  to  give  the  impression — and  then,  in  a  mo- 
ment, the  verse  runs  into  breadth,  smoothness,  and  vast- 
Malory  are  :  "  Syr,  he  sayd,  I  sawe  no  thynge  but  the  waters  wappe 
and  wawes  wanne." 


390  Tennyson 

ness  :  for  Bedivere  comes  to  the  shore  and  sees  the 
great  water : 

And  on  a  sudden,  lo  !  the  level  lake 
And  the  long  glories  of  the  winter  moon, 

in  which  the  vowel  o  in  its  changes  is  used  as  the  vowel  a 
has  been  used  before. 

The  questions  and  replies  of  Arthur  and  Bedivere,  the 
reproaches  of  the  King,  the  excuses  of  the  knight,  the 
sorrow  and  the  final  wrath  of  Arthur,  are  worthy  of  the 
landscape  in  which  the  poet  has  enshrined  them.  They 
are  greater  than  the  landscape,  as  they  ought  to  be  ;  and 
the  dominance  of  the  human  element  in  the  scene  is  a 
piece  of  noble  artist-work.  Arthur  is  royal  to  the  close, 
and  when  he  passes  away  with  the  weeping  Queens 
across  the  mere,  unlike  the  star  of  the  tournament  he 
was  of  old,  he  is  still  the  King.  Sir  Bedivere,  left  alone 
on  the  freezing  shore,  hears  the  King  give  his  last  mes- 
sage to  the  world.  It  is  a  modern  Christian  who  speaks, 
but  the  phrases  do  not  sound  out  of  harmony  with  that 
which  might  be  in  Romance.  Moreover,  the  end  of  the 
saying  is  of  Avilion  or  Avalon — of  the  old  heathen 
Celtic  place  where  the  wounded  are  healed  and  the  old 
made  young. 

Only  then — with  this  recurrence  to  the  ancient  stories 
of  the  Irish  land  of  youth,  of  the  City  of  God  to  which 
Galahad  went,  and  of  the  joy  of  the  land  a, re  Ogier 
voyaged  when  the  wars  of  earth  were  over — only  then, 
and  with  enough  dimness  not  to  jar,  the  allegory  steals 


Idylls  of  the  King 


391 


back  again.  Arthur  is  again  the  Soul  of  Man  that 
seeks  the  fair  country  whence  it  came.  Sir  Bedivere 
cries  out : 

"  The  King  IS  gone." 
And  there  withal  came  on  him  the  weird  rhyme, 
"  From  the  great  deep  to  the  great  deep  he  goes." 

Then  from  the  dawn  it  seem'd  there  came,  but  faint 
As  from  beyond  the  limit  of  the  world. 
Like  the  last  echo  born  of  a  great  cry, 
Sounds,  as  if  some  fair  city  were  one  voice 
Around  a  king  returning  from  his  wars. 


CHAPTER  XI 

ENOCH  ARDEN  AND  THE  SEA-POETRY 

TT^NOCH  ARDEN  is  one  of  a  series  of  narrative 
i~_2j  poems  by  Tennyson,  which  have  to  do  with  or- 
dinary human  life  in  a  simple  and  quiet  manner. 
Some,  like  Enoch  Arden,  deal  with  the  whole  life-story 
of  a  few  persons.  Some,  like  Aylmers  Field  and  TJie 
Gardener  s  Daughter,  tell  the  story  of  events  in  the 
midst  of  human  life  which  lead  to  the  misery  or  happi- 
ness of  those  involved  in  them.  Some,  like  The  Brook 
or  Love  and  Duty,  tells  the  events  of  a  day  in  which 
lovers  are  reconciled,  or  part  for  ever  ;  and  some,  like 
Sea  Dreams,  tell  of  a  sudden  crisis  coming  on  the  life 
of  men  and  women  and  making  a  crisis  in  the  life  of 
their  soul.  There  are  others,  like  The  Sisters,  but 
they  may  all  be  grouped  as  narrative  poems  written  in 
blank  verse,  and  we  may  call  them  Idylls  of  daily  life. 

They  stand  apart  by  their  form  from  the  lyric  poems 
which  treat  of  the  same  human  matters,  but  which  nat- 
urally confine  themselves  to  moments  of  life  made  in- 
tense by  the  passions.     Their  l)lank  verse  is  of  a  special 

393 


Enoch  Ardeii  and  the  Sea- Poetry      393 

kind.  It  has  a  natural  freedom  and  simplicity  which  is 
not  permissible  in  heroic  blank  verse  such  as  the  poet 
used  in  the  Idylls  of  the  King  or  in  the  classical  poems. 
Tennyson,  who  knew  his  art,  is  exceedingly  strict  about 
this  difference.  The  blank  verse  of  Enoch  Arden  is 
quite  distinct,  for  example,  from  that  used  in  The  Pass- 
ing of  Arthur.  A  great  deal  might  be  said  on  this  mat- 
ter, but  it  belongs  to  a  minuter  criticism  than  is  aimed  at 
here,  and,  after  all,  his  readers  can  hear  the  difference 
for  themselves,  if  they  possess  an  ear  for  poetry.  If  they 
do  not,  no  explanation  will  do  them  any  good. 

This  narrative  poem  of  simple  life  is  different  from 
that  class  of  poems  of  which  Tennyson  may  be  said  to 
have  been  the  inventor — short  dialogues  or  narration  of 
dialogues  in  blank  verse  between  three  or  four  w-ell- 
bred  persons  on  topics  of  social  interest,  such  as  Aiidlcy 
Court,  Waititig  for  the  Mail,  or  The  Golden  Year — some- 
times delightful,  sometimes  too  pedestrian,  half-serious, 
half-humorous  things,  but  the  humour  coarse-grained  ; 
slowly-moving  clouds  of  conversation  touched  here  and 
there  with  the  crimson  of  love.  These  things  were 
wholly  his  own,  and  new  ;  but  the  narrative  poem  of 
daily  life  among  the  poor,  like  Enoch  Arden,  was  not 
new.  We  have  it  in  the  tales  of  Crabbe,  and  very 
plainly  in  that  class  of  Wordsworth's  poems  of  which 
Michael  is  the  best  representative.  After  Wordsworth, 
none  of  the  greater  poets  took  up  this  special  subject 
or  used  its  form  of  poetry.  It  is  not  made  by  Walter 
Scott,  by    Byron,  Shelley,    or    Keats.      Tennyson,    who 


394  Tennyson 

had  a  great  deal  of  Wordsworth's  simplicity  and  nig- 
gedness,  and  also  his  power  of  seeing  the  deep  things 
of  human  nature  in  the  common  life  of  man,  saw  the 
capabilities  of  this  kind  of  subject,  restored  it  to  poetry, 
and  enlarged  its  range  and  its  variety  in  a  way  of  which 
Wordsworth  had  no  conception.  He  invented  at  least 
half  a  dozen  new  forms  of  it,  but  the  form  of  which  I 
now  write  is  that  in  which  Enoch  Arden  is  written.  It 
resembles  that  which  Wordsworth  used  in  Michael,  but 
Tennyson  began  this  class  of  poetry  with  Dora. 

Dora  seems  absolutely  simple,  but  it  is  not  really  so 
simple  as  Michael.  It  is,  perhaps,  a  little  too  elaborately 
simple.  When  I  say  that  Wordsworth's  poems  of  this 
type  are  more  simple  than  Dora,  I  mean  that  the  style 
Wordsworth  uses  is  more  in  harmony  with  the  homespun 
matter.  The  style  of  Michael  does  not  draw  attention 
to  itself  and  away  from  the  subject.  The  style  of  Dora, 
in  relation  to  its  subject,  is  concise  to  a  fault — so  con- 
cise that  it  forces  us  to  think  of  it  as  much  as  of  the 
story.  We  are  driven,  in  perhaps  too  critical  a  mood, 
to  say  :  "  The  man  who  wrote  this  was  not  so  full  of 
the  emotion  of  his  tale  as  not  to  consider,  somewhat  too 
much,  how  briefly,  with  justice  to  poetry,  he  could  put 
it.  So  far,  he  was  losing  emotion,  and  so  far  he  has 
caused  us,  by  compelling  us  to  think  of  his  conciseness, 
to  lose  emotion  also." 

Moreover,  this  extreme  brevity  of  representation  is 
quite  unlike  the  way  in  which  life  is  conducted  by  the 
class  of  which  he  writes.     The  men  and  women  of  this 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      395 

class  live  a  delayed  life.  When  their  doings  and  say- 
ings are  so  condensely  given  as  they  are  in  Dora,  we 
are  taken  out  of  their  atmosphere.  Passion,  it  is  true, 
at  its  height  is  brief,  but  the  whole  of  life  is  not  spent 
in  passion  ;  and  there  ought  in  poems  of  this  kind  to  be 
something  which  should  draw  the  movement  out,  and 
fill  up  the  time  between  the  outbursts  of  strong  emotion. 
The  slowness  in  such  lives  of  the  ebb  and  flow  of  cir- 
cumstance ought  to  be  impressed  upon  us.  Even  in 
the  rapid  rush  of  the  Iliad,  and  even  in  heroic  life, 
Homer  takes  care  that  there  should  be  some  delay. 
Though  the  similes  he  uses  are  so  connected  with  the 
main  movement  by  their  fitness  to  the  things  they  illus- 
trate that  swiftness  is  not  lost,  yet  they  also  give  us 
the  sense  that  there  is  time  to  spare.  They  enable  us 
to  linger  a  little,  even  in  the  full  tide  of  battle,  as  life 
lingers.  Wordsworth  hums  along  in  Michael,  as 
Michael  himself  and  his  wife  hummed  slowly  on  in  life. 
And  though  the  lover  of  conciseness,  when  he  reads 
Michael,  becomes  somewhat  indignant  with  Wordsworth, 
and  though  the  poet  himself  seems  sometimes  dull,  yet 
the  story  is  deliberately  told  in  this  way  by  the  artist 
in  order  that  we  may  be  kept  in  the  mental  climate  of  the 
shepherd-class  of  which  he  writes.  Nor,  indeed,  at  the 
end  does  he  fail  in  the  impression  he  wants  to  give. 
Michael  remains  a  far  more  impressive  thing  than  Dora. 
Wordsworth  moves  more  closely  in  the  life  of  which  he 
speaks,  and  has  lost  himself  in  it,  more  than  Tennyson. 
The    question   of  style  does  not    occur  to    him.     The 


396  Tennyson 

style  of  Michael  is  formed  by  the  subject  itself.  I  think 
that  Tennyson  felt  something  of  what  I  have  said,  for 
it  is  plain  that  Enoch  Arden  is  written  in  quite  a  differ- 
ent manner  from  Dora.  It  is  concise,  of  course  ; 
Tennyson  was  always  concise  ;  but  Enoch  Arden  is  not 
overconcise.  The  action  of  the  piece,  and  the  move- 
ment of  the  feelings  of  the  persons  in  it,  are  delayed. 
There  is  repetition,  there  is  enough  talking  over  events 
to  make  us  understand  that  years  and  years  i)ass  by. 
The  atmosphere  of  a  remote  seaside  hamlet,  and  of  its 
life  from  day  to  day,  is  fully  preserved  and  felt.  We 
do  not  think,  as  we  do  when  we  read  Dora,  of  the  style 
at  all.  It  has  come  ;  it  is  exactly  right  ;  it  has  grown 
naturally  out  of  the  artist's  2:)rofound  feeling  of  his 
subject.  Moreover,  the  verse  is  plain  in  sound,  and 
takes  pains  to  be  like  the  talk  of  daily  common  life.  It 
never  rises  into  the  heroic  march  save  twice,  once  in  the 
description  of  the  tropic  isle  by  day  and  night  ;  and 
again,  when  Enoch  looks  in  at  the  window  and  sees  his 
home  in  which  he  has  no  share.  Even  the  similes  (in 
which  a  poet  is  allowed  to  soar  a  little)  are  restrained 
into  simplicity.  The  things  used  in  illustration  belong 
to  the  same  level  of  life  to  which  the  rest  of  the  poem 
belongs.  I  quote  two  of  them  to  show  what  I  mean. 
Annie,  wrapt  in  sorrow  for  Enoch's  going,  does  not 
know  of  what  he  speaks  : 

Heard  and  not  heard  him  ;  as  the  village  girl, 
V  Who  sets  her  pitcher  underneath  the  spring, 

Musing  on  him  who  used  to  fill  it  for  her. 
Hears  and  not  hears,  and  lets  it  overflow. 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      397 

That  is  one — a  rustic  picture  and  a  rustic  heart  fixed 
in  four  lines  ;  and  this  is  another — born  out  of  a  sailor's 
life,  and  fitted  in  grave  simplicity  to  the  mighty  relief 
of  death  : 

For  sure  no  gladlier  does  the  stranded  wreck 
See  thro'  the  gray  skirts  of  a  lifting  squall 
The  boat  that  bears  the  hope  of  life  approach 
To  save  the  life  despair'd  of,  than  he  saw 
Death  dawning  on  him,  and  the  close  of  all. 

Such  is  the  atmosphere. 

There  is  not  much  of  natural  description  in  the  poem. 
But  Tennyson  sets  the  scenery  of  the  action  in  the  first 
nine  lines — 

Long  lines  of  cliff  breaking  have  left  a  chasm  ;  etc. 

They  cannot  be  called  a  description  of  Nature.  They 
make,  as  it  were,  the  scenic  background  before  which  a 
drama  is  to  be  played,  and  this  is  all  the  poet  intends 
them  to  represent.  Two  other  scenes  are  laid,  one 
where  the  wood  feathers  down  to  the  hollow  filled  with 
hazels,  where  both  Enocli  and  Philip  tell  their  love  to 
Annie  ;  and  the  other,  the  room  in  tlie  cottage  where 
we  see  Philip  and  Enoch's  wife,  and  the  garden  witliout 
in  the  dark,  whence  Enoch  looks  through  the  window 
with  a  breaking  heart.  One  other  scene  is  set  in  the 
tropic  isle  where  Enoch  sits  among  the  palms,  gazing  on 
the  separating  sea.  This  is  the  one  distinct  description 
of  Nature  in  the  poem,  and,  though  it  is  good,  it  is  not 
as  good   as    another  poet   who   sympathised   more  with 


398  Tennyson 

that  type  of  Nature  would  have  made  it.  Tennyson,  I 
have  said,  was  out  of  his  element  when  he  was  away 
from  England.  And  this  description,  with  which  he 
seems  to  have  taken  great  pains,  is  not  fused  together  by 
any  feeling  for  the  Nature  described  ;  there  is  no  colour 
in  it  but  scarlet ;  and  the  one  line  in  it  which  is  first-rate 
might  have  been  written  in  Cornwall  from  sight  : 

The  league-long  roller  thundering  on  the  reef. 

It  is  instructive  to  compare  its  emotionless  *  verses  to 
those  that  follow,  when  Enoch  in  his  hungry-hearted 
reverie  sees  in  vision  his  native  town,  his  native  land. 
These  are  full  of  the  very  breath  and  passion  of  Eng- 
land • 

The  climbing  street,  the  mill,  the  leafy  lanes, 
The  peacock-yewtree  and  the  lonely  Hall, 
The  horse  he  drove,  the  boat  he  sold,  the  chill 
November  dawns  and  dewy-glooming  downs. 
The  gentle  shower,  the  smell  of  dying  leaves. 
And  the  low  moan  of  leaden-colour'd  seas. 

Nor  can  I  omit  the  exquisite  sentiment  which  sighs 
through  Enoch's  first  sight  of  England,  when  all  the 
quintessence  of  his  native  land  and  of  her  natural  scen- 
ery is  wafted  from  the  dim  coast  to  the  returning  ship. 

*  When  I  call  these  lines  emotionless,  I  only  mean  that  they  are 
not  thrilled  with  any  affection  for  the  scenery  itself.  They  are  full 
with  another  kind  of  emotion — of  Enoch's  misery,  of  his  hatred  for 
the  incessant  and  foreign  beauty  of  the  land  and  sea.  And  it  may  be 
that  the  faint  praise  I  give  them  ought  to  be,  in  another  aspect,  the 
fullest  praise  possible.  Perhaps  the  poet  made  them  cold  that  he 
might  express  the  weary  anger  of  Enoch's  heart. 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      399 

In    these   visions   of    his   country — for  surely  Tennyson 

himself  is  speaking  here — he  is  unequalled   in  English 

poetry. 

His  fancy  fled  before  the  lazy  wind 
Returning,  till  beneath  a  clouded  moon 
He  like  a  lover  down  thro'  all  his  blood 
Drew  in  the  dewy  meadowy  morning-breath 
Of  England,  blown  across  her  ghostly  wall. 

As  to  the  humanity  of  the  poem,  he  that  runs  may 
read  it.  It  also  is  kept  at  a  quiet  level,  but  it  is  none 
the  less  impressive.  It  never  breaks  into  sensation ; 
not  even  when  Enoch  returns  to  see  his  wife  married  to 
another,  and  his  children  with  another  father.  Nor  has 
Tennyson  any  special  ethical  aim  in  what  he  writes. 
His  work  springs  straight  out  of  the  situation.  Enoch, 
Philip,  Annie  could  not  have  acted  otherwise — once  we 
see  their  character.  How  easy  it  seems,  as  we  read  it, 
to  do  this  well  !  How  supremely  difficult  it  is  except 
for  an  artist  who  has  loved  his  art  for  years  ! 

It  is  with  an  art  charged  with  humanity  that  the  intro- 
duction to  the  poem  prophesies  the  whole  action  of  the 
poem  by  the  play  of  the  children  on  the  beach.  In  the 
narrow  cave  the  children  keep  house.  Enoch  was  host 
one  day,  Philip  the  next,  while  Annie  still  was  mistress. 
"  This  is  my  house,  and  this  my  little  wife,"  cries 
Enoch.  "  Mine  too,"  said  Philip,  "  turn  and  turn 
about."     And  when  they  quarrelled, 

The  little  wife  would  weep  for  company, 
And  pray  them  not  to  quarrel  for  her  sake, 
And  say  she  would  be  little  wife  to  both. 


400  Tennyson 

The  childhood's  play  contains  the  fate  of  the  men  and 
women.     This  is  well-shaped,  skilful  composition. 

Step  by  step,  on  these  simple  lines,  the  story  grows. 
The  passage  where  Philip  sees  Enoch  speak  to  Annie, 
and  slips  aside  like  a  wounded  life  into  the  hollows  of 
the  wood,  is  beautiful,  alike  for  the  joy  and  the  sorrow 
described  in  it,  and  for  its  simple  gravity  of  style.  Yet  it 
is  only  one  of  many  passages  full  of  that  quiet  strength 
of  emotion  which  belongs  to  lowly  English  life,  and 
especially  to  those  who  live  on  the  sea-board.  We  do 
not  feel,  at  first  reading  of  the  poem — owing  to  its  care- 
ful lowness  of  note — the  force  with  which  Tennyson  has 
grasped  the  humanity  of  his  subject,  but  we  do  feel  a 
vague  impression  of  it.  Afterwards  the  vague  impres- 
sion becomes  a  conviction  of  extraordinary  power.  But 
of  course  the  full  humanity  of  the  poem  gathers  round 
the  return  of  Enoch  to  find  his  wife  Philip's  wife,  and 
his  own  children  Philip's  children.  And  Tennyson, 
without  transgressing  his  peaceful  limit,  is  steadily  equal 
to  the  central  emotion  of  the  tale. 

As  Enoch  draws  homeward  to  meet  his  tragedy,  nature 
sympathises  with  him.  The  sea-haze  shrouds  the  world 
in  gray,  the  holt  is  withered,  the  robin  pipes  disconso- 
late. Thicker  the  drizzle  grew,  deeper  the  gloom.  At 
last  the  town  "  flares  on  him  in  a  mist-blotted  light." 
He  heard  at  the  inn  the  doom  which  had  happened  to 
him,  and  stole  out  to  look  at  his  home  in  the  sad  No- 
vember dark.  And  while  he  stood  without  the  cottage, 
clothed   in   the  gloom,  he  saw   wife   and   children   and 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      401 

friends  happy  in  the  genial  light.  It  was  difficult  to 
describe  the  passion  in  the  lonely  man  ;  it  was  still  more 
difficult  to  keep  him  true  to  the  highest  in  his  character, 
to  his  staid  and  sacred  sense  of  duty  resting  on  love,  in 
this  terrible  hour  ;  but  Tennyson  does  it  with  concen- 
trated power.  The  poet  is  as  nobly  self-controlled  as 
the  character  he  draws. 

Now  when  the  dead  man  come  to  life  beheld 
His  wife  his  wife  no  more,  and  saw  the  babe 
Hers,  yet  not  his,  upon  the  father's  knee. 
And  all  the  warmth,  the  peace,  the  happiness. 
And  his  own  children  tall  and  beautiful, 
And  him,  that  other,  reigning  in  his  place, 
Lord  of  his  rights  and  of  his  children's  love, — 
Then  he,  tho'  Miriam  Lane  had  told  him  all, 
Because  things  seen  are  mightier  than  things  heard, 
Stagger'd  and  shook,  holding  the  branch,  and  fear'd 
To  send  abroad  a  shrill  and  terrible  cry. 
Which  in  one  moment,  like  the  blast  of  doom, 
Would  shatter  all  the  happiness  of  the  hearth. 

The  last  three  lines  lift  the  description  into  the  lofty 
tragic  note.  Nor  is  the  close  less  nobly  conceived. 
Enoch  might  have  died  a  miserable  man,  shattered  by 
his  fate,  and  our  pity  for  him  been  charged  with  a  sor- 
rowful contempt  for  human  nature.  But  this  is  not  in 
the  bond.  Like  the  epic  hero,  he  conquers  fate.  The 
soul  triumphs.     He  is  more  of  the  hero  than  Arthur : 

He  was  not  all  unhappy.     His  resolve 
Upbore  him,  and  firm  faith,  and  evermore 
Prayer  from  a  living  source  within  the  will, 
And  beating  up  thro'  all  the  bitter  world. 
Like  fountains  of  sweet  water  in  the  sea, 
Kept  him  a  living  soul. 
26 


402  Tennyson 

The  whole  of  his  self-sacrifice  is  accomplished,  and  at 
the  end  the  poet  uses  splendidly  a  common  legend  of 
the  sea-coast.  He  brings  all  the  mighty  Ocean  into 
Enoch's  chamber  at  the  hour  of  death  to  glorify  him 
with  its  sympathy.  On  the  third  night  after  he  left  his 
message  for  his  people, 

There  came  so  loud  a  calling  of  the  sea, 

that  he  awoke  and  died. 

This  is  Tennyson's  one  long  poem  about  the  poor,  for 
Enoch  is  always  a  poor  man.  And  it  is  characteristic  of 
him  that  he  chooses  for  his  hero  among  the  working- 
classes  one  who  belongs  to  the  sea  rather  than  the  land, 
a  fisherman  and  then  a  merchant  sailor ;  for,  next  to  his 
own  sweet,  soft  English  southern  land,  he  loved  the  sea. 
He  saw  it  day  by  day  for  a  great  part  of  his  life  from 
his  home  in  the  Isle  of  Wight.  It  dwelt  in  his  observing 
imagination,  and  he  knew,  all  along  the  coast,  its  moods 
and  fantasies,  its  steadiness  and  its  changes,  its  ways  of 
thinking  and  feeling  and  acting,  as  a  man  knows  his 
wife.  But  he  loved  it,  not  only  for  itself,  but  for  the 
sake  of  the  English  folk  that  sailed  upon  it,  whose  au- 
dacity and  constancy  had  made  England  the  mistress  of 
the  Deep.  He  loved  it  also  as  a  part  of  England  and 
her  Empire.  Wherever  over  all  the  oceans  Tennyson's 
imagination  bore  him,  he  felt  that  there,  from  tropic  to 
pole  and  from  pole  to  tropic,  he  was  in  England.  His 
love  of  country  and  his  love  of  the  sea  were  fused  into 
one  passion  : 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      403 

Thine  the  myriad-rolling  ocean,  light  and  shadow  illimitable, 
Thine  the  lands  of  lasting  summer,  many-blossoming  Paradises, 
Thine  the  North  and  thine  the  South  and  thine  the  battle-thun- 
der of  God. 

So  chanted  the  prophetesses  in  Boadicea  concerning  a 
future  England  with  which  they  had  but  little  national 
concern,  but  in  reality  Tennyson  is  singing  in  these 
splendid  lines  his  own  English  folk  and  their  glory  ;  and 
I  cannot  finish  this  chapter  better  than  by  gathering 
together  the  greater  part  of  what  he  says  about  English 
seamen  and  the  English  sea.  It  forms  a  special  element 
in  his  work. 

Enoch — to  speak  first  of  him — is  the  type  of  the 
"  able  seamen  "  of  England,  nourished  in  the  fishing- 
smack,  and  then  passing  from  land  to  land  through  the 
wonders  of  the  waves  in  the  merchant-vessel  ;  and  then, 
when  wars  arise,  the  mainstay  of  our  navies — a  type 
which  has  lasted  more  than  a  thousand  years.  Arden's 
godfearingness  is  not  uncommon  in  English  seamen, 
but  his  slow-established  sense  of  duty  is  common  ;  and 
so  are  also  his  sturdy  endurance,  his  settled  self-sacrifice 
for  those  ideas  that  his  soul  approves,  his  courage  un- 
conscious of  itself,  his  silent  love  of  his  country — a 
careful,  loving,  and  faithful  picture,  for  which  we  have 
to  honour  the  poet.  Nowhere  has  he  shown  more 
convincingly  the  noblest  side  of  his  patriotism. 

We  have  another  type  in  Sir  Richard  Grenville, 
painted  in  that  ringing  and  high-angered  ballad — the 
fight  of  The  Revenge.     The  soul  of  the  Elizabethan  age 


404  Tennyson 

and  of  its  great  adventures,  its  hatred  of  Spain,  its  l)old 
sea-captains  who  Laughed  the  impossible  to  scorn,  even 
the  very  ballad-music  of  the  time,  inform  that  ballad, 
which  dashes  along  like  the  racing  billows  of  the  sea. 
Nor  is  the  mystic  element  of  the  sea  and  ships  absent 
from  it  in  the  end.  The  Rcveitge  herself  is  alive,  and 
does  not  desire  to  live  when  she  has  an  alien  crew. 

And  away  she  sail'd  with  her  loss  and  longed  for  }ur  own, 

is  a  line  of  pure  imagination.  And  the  great  ocean  and 
the  sky  feel  with  the  ship — they,  too,  are  English  ;  no 
English  boat,  they  think,  shall  belong  to  Spain — and 
they  bury  The  Revenge  in  the  fathomless  main  by  the 
island  crags.  This  is  a  noble  close  to  a  ballad  which, 
while  the  sea  endures,  the  sea-wolves  of  England  will 
love  to  hear. 

The  Sailor  Boy  enshrines  another  type  ;  nay,  rather, 
it  is  a  concentration  into  a  short  poem  of  the  temper  of 
all  seamen  in  lands  where  the  sea  is  loved.  It  holds  in 
it  the  sailor's  sense  of  the  dangers  of  the  deep,  of  the 
woes  and  weariness  of  his  life,  of  his  wonder  that  he  can 
endure  them,  of  his  wish  to  stay  on  land,  of  his  super- 
stitious terror,  of  his  lonely  death  in  the  homeless 
waves  or  on  the  cruel  shore  ;  and,  as  we  read,  we  hear 
the  long  cry  which  began  with  the  first  poetry  of  Eng- 
land ;  and  which  Tennyson  also  placed  on  the  lips  of 
the  Greeks  who  were  almost  as  eager  seamen  as  the 
English  : 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      405 

Most  weary  seem'd  the  sea,  weary  the  oar, 
Weary  the  wandering  fields  of  barren  foam. 

We  have  had  enough  of  action,  and  of  motion  we, 

Roll'd  to  starboard,  roll'd  to  larboard,  when  the  surge  was  seething 

free, 
Where  the  wallowing  monster  spouted  his  foam-fountains  in  the  sea. 

Surely,  surely,  slumber  is  more  sweet  than  toil,  the  shore 
Than  labour  in  the  deep  mid-ocean,  wind  and  wave  and  oar  ; 
Oh  rest  ye,  brother  mariners,  we  will  not  wander  more. 

But  there  is  also  in  The  Sailor  Boy  that  fierce  and  keen 
attraction,  that  Siren-singing  of  the  sea,  as  of  beauty 
hiding  horror  in  it,  which,  pulling  at  the  hearts  of 
English  sailors,  dragged  them  forth  from  their  quiet 
hamlets  under  the  cliff ;  whose  voice  drew  Drake  round 
the  Horn  and  Frobisher  to  the  Arctics,  and  a  million 
hardy  souls  into  every  recess  of  the  wide  ocean,  to  live 
and  die  in  adventure  and  in  trading,  in  treasure-hunting 
and  battle-hunting,  in  discovery,  and  in  undying  imagi- 
nation. This  also  comes  down  to  us  from  poetry  more 
than  a  thousand  years  ago.  Those  who  will  read  The 
Seafarer,  a  Northumbrian  poem  of  the  eighth  or  ninth 
century,  will  hear,  through  its  strangely  modern  note, 
this  double  music  of  the  sea,  its  two  cries  of  repulsion 
and  attraction  which  may  perhaps  mingle  into  one 
voice  in  that  allurement  of  danger,  which  is  more  felt, 
I  think,  by  seamen  than  by  any  other  class  of  men. 
The  Sailor  Boy  embodies  all  these  elements  of  feel- 
ing. I  refer  my  readers  to  it.  To  quote  a  part  of  it 
would  spoil  it  ;  to  quote  the  whole  of  it  would  not  be  fair. 


4o6  Tennyson 

Again  and  again  this  wild  attraction  of  the  Unknown 
in  the  deep  sea  is  expressed  by  Tennyson.  It  breathes 
underneath  the  Ulysses.  I  have  suffered  greatly,  cries 
Ulysses,  and  enjoyed  greatly,  on  shore,  and  when 

Thro'  scudding  drifts  the  rainy  Hyades 
Vext  the  dim  sea — 

Push  off,  and  sitting  well  in  order  smite 
The  sounding  furrows  ;  for  my  purpose  holds 
To  sail  beyond  the  sunset  and  the  baths 
Of  all  the  western  stars,  until  I  die. 

It  lives  in  The  Voyage,  that  delightful  poem,  with  its 
double  meaning,  half  of  the  life  on  the  sea  and  half  of 
the  life  of  the  soul,  and  wholly  of  those  who,  like  sea- 
men, have  no  care  for  business  and  science  and  the  real 
world  ;  who  race  after  the  undiscovered  shore,  who  fol- 
low the  gleam,  who  live  for  ideas,  not  for  things.  The 
same  desire  is  at  the  root  of  the  invention  of  Ten- 
nyson concerning  the  passing  away  of  Galahad,  who 
seeks  the  sacred  and  golden  city,  not  on  land,  as  in  the 
original,  but  by  sailing  over  the  untravelled  seas  ;  and, 
finally,  the  full  yearning  of  the  seaman  for  the  discovery 
of  new  lands  after  patient  sailing  on  the  huge  wastes  of 
the  ocean,  and  his  rapture  in  the  first  sight  of  them, 
break  forth  in  the  true  extravagance  of  the  only  entirely 
noble  lines  in  the  Columbus  : 

Who  push'd  his  prows  into  the  setting  sun, 
And  made  west  east,  and  sail'd  the  Dragon's  mouth, 
And  came  upon  the  Mountain  of  the  World, 
And  saw  the  rivers  roll  from  Paradise. 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      407 

As  to  the  great  creature  herself,  the  Woman  of  our 
universe — the  soft,  cruel,  reckless,  restless,  delightful,  and 
terrible  mistress  of  the  land — she  lives  in  a  changeful 
variety  through  the  poetry  of  Tennyson,  but  she  lives 
only  on  the  coast.  With  his  turn  for  truth,  for  writing 
only  of  what  he  had  observed,  he  does  not  take  us  into 
the  deep  ocean,  save  in  one  stanza  of  In  Memoriam,  in 
The  Voyage,  and  in  a  few  scattered  lines.*  He  rarely 
goes  beyond  the  edge  of  the  cliff  or  the  margent  of  the 
beach.  But  he  describes  there  the  manners  of  the  great 
waters  with  far  more  accuracy  than  any  other  of  the  by- 
gone poets.  His  whole  eyes  were  given  to  see  truly  and 
vividly,  and  all  his  imagination  to  record  with  joy,  the 
doings  of  the  billows  on  the  land.  It  may  be  well  to 
bring  some  of  these  together.  Most  of  them  are  of  the 
waves  racing  in  upon  the  coast,  and  breaking  on  the 
cliffs  or  up  the  beach.  The  first  of  these  I  choose  is  in 
The  Lover  s  Tale,  and  the  manner  of  it  is  already  Tenny- 
son's own  : 

The  slowly  ridging  rollers  ou  the  cliffs 
Clash'd,  calling  to  each  other. 

"  Deep  calleth  unto  deep  "  saith  the  Psalm.  This  ridg- 
ing of  the  billows  is  a  favourite  image,  and  he  generally 
mingles  it   with  the  breaking  down   of   the  ridges  into 

*  Here  is  one  noble  passage  of  wave-tossing  in  fierce  wind  on  the 
outer  sea : 

As  a  wild  wave  in  the  wide  North  Sea 
Green-glimmering  toward  the  summit,  bears,  with  all 
Its  stormy  crests  that  smoke  against  the  skies.     . 


4o8  Tennyson 

cataracts — a  word  he  uses  to  suggest  the  roar  and  white- 
ness of  the  waters  as  they  fall : 

Tho'  heapt  in  mounds  and  ridges  all  the  sea 
Drove  like  a  cataract,  and  all  the  sand 
Swept  like  a  river. 

7"^!?  Holy  Grail. 

And  the  hollow  ocean-ridges  roaring  into  cataracts. 

Locks  ley  Hall. 

Those  who  have  walked  on  the  Lido  near  Venice,  when 

a  tempest  was  blowing,  know  what  Tennyson  meant  by 

the  sweeping  river  of  the  sand.     The  dry  grains  stream 

past  in  a  continuous    cloud,  as  thick  as    torrent    rain. 

Another  time  he  sees  a  different  effect  of  wind  over  wet 

sand  : 

Crisp  foam-flakes  scud  along  the  level  sand 
Torn  from  the  fringe  of  spray. 

He  hears  "  the  shingle  grinding  in  the  surge,"  and  "  the 
scream  of  a  maddened  beach  dragged  down  by  the 
wave  "  ;  but  sees,  with  equal  truth,  the  soft  upcoming  of 
the  peaceful  swell  on  the  smooth,  flat  sand — "  dappled 
dimplings  of  the  wave  "  ;  or 

the  crisping  ripples  on  the  beach 
And  tender  curving  lines  of  creamy  spray. 

Or  with  the  sad  creatures  in  Despair.^  waits 

Till  the  points  of  the  foam  in  the  dusk  came  playing  about 
our  feet. 

He  looks  on  a  nobler,  larger  aspect  of  the  waters  out- 
spreading over  distant,  shallow  sands — when  from  "  the 
lazy-plunging  sea  " 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry     409 

the  great  waters  break 
Whitening  for  half  a  league,  and  thin  themselves 
Far  over  sands  marbled  with  moon  and  cloud. 

Or,  once  more,  he  lies  on  the  shore  to  watch 

the  curl'd  white  of  the  coming  wave 
Glass'd  in  the  slippery  sand  before  it  breaks. 

He  has  seen  with  no  less  force  the  wave  breaking  on 
the  cliffs,  and  heard  its  roar  with  a  no  less  attentive  ear. 
Into  the  cove  at  Tintagil  comes  a  ninth  wave,  which, 

gathering  half  the  deep 
And  full  of  voices,  slowly  rose  and  plunged 
Roaring,  and  all  the  wave  was  in  a  flame. 

And  the  fringe 
Of  that  great  breaker,  sweeping  up  the  strand 
Lash'd  at  the  wizard  as  he  spake  the  word, 
And  all  at  once  all  round  him  rose  in  fire. 

This  splendid  piece  of  phosphoric  sea  is  matched  by  the 
tidal-wave  in  Sea  Dreams  scaling  the  cliffs  and  explod- 
ing in  the  caves.  When  a  wave  fills  a  cave  the  com- 
pressed air  bursts  out  like  a  clap  of  thunder  : 

But  while  the  two  were  sleeping,  a  full  tide 

Rose  with  ground-swell,  which,  on  the  foremost  rocks 

Touching,  upjetted  in  spirts  of  wild  sea-smoke, 

And  scaled  in  sheets  of  wasteful  foam,  and  fell 

In  vast  sea-cataracts — ever  and  anon 

Dead  claps  of  thunder  from  within  the  cliffs 

Heard  thro'  the  living  roar. 

A  similar  thunder  is  recorded  in  the  Palace  of  Art,  where 

the  billows 

roar  rock-thwarted  under  bellowing  caves 
Beneath  the  windy  wall. 


4IO  Tennyson 

Then  he  describes  not  only  the  noise,  but  the  still  ad- 
vance of  the  windless  swell  into  and  through  the  cavern  : 

As  on  a  dull  day  in  an  ocean  cave 

The  blind  wave  feeling  round  his  long  sea-hall 

In  silence. 

He  does  not  often  speak  of  the  great  calm.  There  are 
the  tropic  lines  in  Maud : 

Half-lost  in  the  liquid  azure  bloom  of  a  crescent  of  sea, 
The  silent,  sapphire-spangled,  marriage-ring  of  the  land. 

There  is  that  passage  in  Enoch  Arden  when  the  Pacific 
lies  outspread  and  blazing  in  the  sun,  but  even  that  is 
made  alive  by 

The  league-long  roller  thundering  on  the  reef. 

There  are  the  lines  in  the  Princess,  where  the  Prince 
sees  in  vision 

A  full  sea  glazed  with  muffled  moonlight,  swell 
On  some  dark  shore  just  seen  that  it  was  rich. 

This  is  the  only  calm  sea-moonlight  I  remember  in  the 
poems.     That  lovely  metaphor  in  Maud, 

If  a  hand  as  white 
As  ocean-foam  in  the  moon, 

borders  upon  storm  ;  and  so  does  the  only  other  moon- 
lighted sea  I  can  recall — a  very  jewel  of  truth  and  im- 
agination : 

A  still  salt  pool,  lock'd  in  with  bars  of  sand, 

Left  on  the  shore  ;  that  hears  all  night 
The  plunging  seas  draw  backward  from  the  land 

Their  moon-led  waters  white. 


Enoch  Arden  and  the  Sea-Poetry      411 

And  once  at  least  we  see  in  a  lovely  verse  of   the  poem 
to  F.  D.  Maurice,  the  Channel  and  the  ships  : 

Where,  if  below  the  milky  steep 
Some  ship  of  battle  slowly  creep, 

And  on  thro'  zones  of  light  and  shadow 
Glimmer  away  to  the  lonely  deep. 

One  other  sea-piece,  amid  all  these  collected  aspects 
of  observant  truth,  I  myself  saw  realised.  I  used  to 
think  that  the  phrase  "  wrinkled  sea,"  in  the  fragment 
called  The  Eagle,  was  too  bold.  But  one  day  I  stood 
on  the  edge  of  the  cliff  below  Slieve  League  in  Donegal. 
The  cliff  from  which  I  looked  down  on  the  Atlantic  was 
nine  hundred  feet  in  height.  Besides  me  the  giant  slope 
of  Slieve  League  plunged  down  from  its  summit  for 
more  than  eighteen  hundred  feet.  As  I  gazed  down  on 
the  sea  below  which  was  calm  in  the  shelter,  for  the  wind 
blew  off  the  land,  the  varying  puffs  that  eddied  in  and 
out  among  the  hollows  and  juttings  of  the  cliffs  covered 
the  quiet  surface  with  an  infinite  network  of  involved 
ripples.  It  was  exactly  Tennyson's  wrinkled  sea. 
Then,  by  huge  good  fortune,  an  eagle  which  built  on 
one  of  the  ledges  of  Slieve  League,  flew  out  of  his 
eyrie  and  poised,  barking,  on  his  wings  ;  but  in  a  mo- 
ment fell  precipitate,  as  their  manner  is,  straight  down  a 
thousand  feet  to  the  sea.  And  I  could  not  help  crying 
out  : 

The  wrinkled  sea  beneath  him  crawls  ; 

He  watches  from  his  mountain  walls, 

And  like  a  thunderbolt  he  falls. 


CHAPTER  XII 


AYLMER  S   FIELD,  SEA   DREAMS,   THE   BROOK 


A  YLMER S  FIELD  seems  from  one  point  of 
/  \  view  to  have  been  written  as  a  contrast  to  Enoch 
Arden.  Enoch  Arden  was  a  tale  of  humble  life 
and  of  a  fisherman's  self-sacrifice.  Aylmer's  Field  is  a 
tale  of  a  life  on  a  higher  social  level,  and  of  the  other 
than  self-sacrifices  hag-ridden  persons  in  it  sometimes 
make.  Enoch  sacrificed  himself  for  the  sake  of  those 
he  loved.  Sir  Aylmer  sacrificed  his  daughter  and  his 
friend  for  the  sake  of  his  sickly  pride.  Enoch  dies, 
Sir  Aylmer  dies,  but  the  one  leaves  tenderness  and 
happiness  behind  him  and  the  other  bitterness  and 
desolation.  The  law  of  Love  with  its  sanctions  is  em- 
bodied in  these  two  quiet  tales  ;  is  gathered  round 
simple  circumstances,  and  is  woven  in  and  out  with 
common  human  passions  made  mean  or  exalted  in 
various  characters.  The  stories  are  set  in  carefully 
painted  scenery,  and  are  lit  and  warmed  by  a  steadily 
burning  fire  of  imagination. 

But  though   this  doctrine   of   love    arises  from  both 
41a 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    413 

poems  (in  one  of  which  its  fulfihiient  is  shown  and  iv 
the  other  its  negation)  the  poems  themselves  cannot 
be  accused  of  a  conscious  ethical  aim.  Their  driving- 
power  is  not  morality,  but  the  love  of  human  nature  and 
the  desire  not  to  make  beautiful  its  outgoings.  Moreover, 
if  Tennyson  had  aimedatthe  truth  that  self-forgetfulness 
is  the  mother  of  Life  and  self-remembrance  the  mother 
of  Death,  he  would  still  have  done  his  work  within  an 
artist's  sphere.  For  that  truth  is  spiritual,  not  moral.  Its 
doings  belong  to  impulses  of  love  arising  freely  from 
within,  not  to  laws  of  conduct  imposed  from  without. 
As  such,  it  is  a  subject  fitted  for  art,  and  the  fact  is  that 
the  impression  made  by  both  these  poems  is  first  and 
foremost  an  art-impression. 

The  next  thing  to  say  is  that  Aylmer's  Field  is  not  so 
good  a  piece  of  art  as  Enoch  Arden.  It  is  not  so  much  at 
unity  with  itself.  It  ranges  too  quickly  from  simplicity 
to  sensationalism,  and  the  sensational  elements  become 
more  and  more  sensational.  And  Tennyson  was  entirely 
out  of  his  element  in  this  realm  of  writing.  The  sensa- 
tional was  not  native  to  his  character,  and  when  an  artist 
steps  outside  of  his  character  into  a  kind  of  art  for  which 
he  is  naturally  unfitted,  he  is  sure  to  overstrain  the  effort 
he  makes.  The  art  of  a  flamboyant  writer  has  its 
native  limits,  its  native  rules.  When  a  writer  who  has 
nothing  flamboyant  (and  I  apologise  for  this  term)  in 
his  nature,  attempts  that  kind  of  literary  architecture, 
he  exceeds  its  limits  and  he  breaks  its  rules.  This  is 
the  case   in  Aylmer's  Field.     The   dagger  business  is  too 


414  Tennyson 

like  a  novel.  The  wrath  of  Sir  Aylmer  when  he  drives 
out  Leolin  is  more  violent  than  even  the  weakness  of 
his  character  permits.  The  sermon,  though  just  possi- 
ble, is  quite  improbable.  The  scene  in  the  church  is 
more  than  tlie  poetic  stage  on  which  the  tale  is  written 
is  capable  of  bearing.  The  suicide  is  feebler  than 
the  hero,  feeble  as  he  is.  In  fact,  the  hero  is  too  light 
a  person  to  choose  for  a  poem  of  this  kind,  but  if  he  be 
chosen,  he  ought  to  be  made  more  worthy  of  manhood, 
and  of  the  girl  he  loves.  He  should  have  at  least  one 
parenthesis  of  strength  in  his  life.  It  is  not  that  the 
characters  are  out  of  nature,  their  conduct  is  fully  pos- 
sible. But  from  the  point  of  view  of  art,  they  just  over- 
step the  edge  of  the  natural — a  little  too  violent,  a 
little  too  solemn,  a  little  too  weak  for  their  characters  as 
drawn  at  the  beginning,  a  little  more  extreme  than  the 
motives  permit. 

In  Enoch  Arden  a  strong  character  dominates  the 
piece,  and  the  prevalent  overshadowing  of  this  one  char- 
acter (even  during  his  ten  years  of  absence)  binds  the 
whole  poem  into  unity.  In  Aylmer  s  Field,  no  character 
is  dominant,  and  only  circumstances  connect  the  person- 
ages. The  girl  alone,  and  she  passes  through  the  action 
almost  like  a  painted  dream,  leaves  much  impression  on 
the  heart.  But  separately,  the  portraiture  is  effective. 
Since  the  characters  do  not  weave  themselves  together, 
we  are  the  more  forced  to  look  at  them  apart  from  one 
another,  like  pictures  on  a  wall.  From  that  point  of 
view  they  are  full  of  iuterest,  worthy  of  study,  and  real- 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    415 

ised  here  and  there  in  single  lines  with  a  master's  pencil. 
When  it  is  said  of  Edith  that  she  was — 

bounteously  made, 
And  yet  so  finely  that  a  troublous  touch 
Thinn'd,  or  would  seem  to  thin  her  in  a  day, 

we  are  made,  in  a  word,  to  feel  the  girl  through  and 
through.  Not  less  subtle  and  clean-edged  are  the  por- 
traits of  Sir  Aylmer,  of  his  wife,  of  the  Indian  cousin 
who  flashes  in  and  out  of  the  hall,  of  Leolin  himself  in 
his  petulant  love,  his  foaming  wrath,  and  his  shrill  suicide, 
of  the  parson  prophesying  against  the  world  to  relieve 
his  own  indignant  misery,  and  of  the  parents  smitten  at 
last  to  the  quick  of  their  pride,  and  staggering  home  to 
die.  These  are  admirable,  but  they  would  have  been 
more  admirable  had  they  all  been  wrought  together. 

And  the  result,  the  emotional  impression  left  behind 
by  this  work  of  art,  is  not  of  humanity  rising  above  the 
fates  of  life  by  dint  of  love,  but  of  humanity  crushed  by 
the  fates  of  life  because  of  self-thought.  The  impression 
we  receive  is  one  of  human  weakness  and  nothing  else, 
and  it  belongs  to  every  one  of  the  characters.  No 
doubt,  an  artist  can  feel  such  a  subject,  but  is  it  worth 
his  while  to  take  it  ?  It  does  not  purify  the  imagination 
from  fear  of  life,  from  contempt  of  humanity,  or  from 
petty  anger  with  the  common  destinies  of  man.  It  does 
not  set  free  high  emotion.  We  are  left  in  the  common 
not  the  exalted  world,  in  the  sphere  of  social  ethics,  not  in 
the  spiritual  sphere  of  art. 

I  cannot  help  thinking  that  Tennyson  was  half-con- 


41 6  Tennyson 

scious  of  this,  that  he  was  not  content  with  his  piece, 
but  did  not  like  to  surrender  it,  and  therefore  that  he 
laboured  on  it,  in  order  to  use  it,  for  a  long  time.  There 
is  an  extraordinary  excellence  of  workmanship  in  many- 
parts  of  his  poem,  as  if  he  had  toiled  by  exquisiteness  of 
technic  to  redeem  its  general  failure.  The  description 
of  Edith  at  the  beginning,  and  that  which  Averill  makes 
of  her  in  his  sermon  at  the  close  touches  her  as  if  with  a 
pencil  of  delicate  sunshine. 

For  her  fresh  and  innocent  eyes 
Had  such  a  star  of  morning  in  their  blue, 
That  all  neglected  places  of  the  field 
Broke  into  nature's  music  when  they  saw  her. 

And  the  rest  is  almost  equal  to  that.  Moreover,  Tenny- 
son has  enshrined  the  story  in  lovely  English  scenery. 

A  land  of  hops  and  poppy-mingled  corn, 
Little  about  it  stirring  save  a  brook  ! 

are  lines  not  to  be  forgotten  by  Kentish  men  who  love 
their  county.  This  description  also  which  follows  is 
scarcely  bettered  in  all  his  work,  full  as  it  is  of  long  and 
meditative  love  of  the  cottages  of  England  seen  from 
the  outside,  garlanded  with  flowers,  sleeping  like  sheep 
upon  the  green  roadside — 

For  out  beyond  her  lodges,  where  the  brook 
Vocal,  with  here  and  there  a  silence,  ran 
By  sallowy  rims,  arose  the  labourers'  homes. 

Her  art,  her  hand,  her  counsel  all  had  wrought 
About  them  :  here  was  one  that,  summer-blanch'd, 
Was  parcel-bearded  with  the  traveller's  joy 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    417 

In  autumn,  parcel  ivy-clad  ;  and  here 

The  warm-blue  breathings  of  a  hidden  hearth 

Broke  from  a  bovver  of  vine  and  honeysuckle  : 

One  look'd  all  rose-tree,  and  another  wore 

A  close-set  robe  of  jasmine  sown  with  stars  : 

This  had  a  rosy  sea  of  gillyflowers 

About  it ;  this,  a  milky-way  on  earth, 

Like  visions  in  the  Northern  dreamer's  heavens, 

A  lily-avenue  climbing  to  the  doors  ; 

One,  almost  to  the  martin-haunted  eaves, 

A  summer  burial  deep  in  hollyhocks  ; 

Each  its  own  charm  ;  and  Edith's  everywhere. 

This  picture,  so  careful  in  thought  and  sight,  so  skil- 
ful in  words,  and  so  full  of  light  and  flower-opulence,  is 
worthy  of  the  closest  study  ;  but  even  that,  and  the 
piteous  and  beautiful  lines  in  which  the  agony  of  two 
young  hearts  and  the  wild  weeping  of  the  storm  are 
woven  together,  do  not  redeem  the  whole. 

So  they  talk'd. 
Poor  children,  for  their  comfort  :  the  wind  blew  ; 
The  rain  of  heaven,  and  their  own  bitter  tears, 
Tears,  and  the  careless  rain  of  heaven,  mixt 
Upon  their  faces,  as  they  kiss'd  each  other 
In  darkness,  and  above  them  roar'd  the  pine. 

Even  these,  and  the  last  six  lines  of  the  poem,  full  of 
the  life  of  Nature  which  lived  the  more  when  Aylmer's 
field  was  desolate  of  all  the  Aylmers,  are  not,  lovely  and 
true  as  they  are,  more  than  purple  patches  on  a  robe  ill- 
woven. 

I  have  also  sometimes  thought  that  Tennyson  did  not 
quite  relish  making  an  attack  on  the  things  he  loved  so 

well ;  on    long   descent   and  pictured  ancestry,  on  that 
27 


4i8  Tennyson 

l^ride  of  name  and  lands  and  fitting  wedlock,  which  the 
squires  of  England  cherish.  These  things  he  loved, 
when  they  were  not  inhuman.  When  they  made  men 
and  women  inhuman,  he  denounced  them  as  heartily 
as  any  Republican,  for  he  was  a  poet,  and  Love  with 
him  was  first.  But  when  a  man  denounces  the  extremes 
of  what  he  likes,  he  is  liable  to  represent  those  extremes 
too  darkly,  to  make  them  worse  than  they  are,  lest  he 
should  be  thought  to  attack  the  real  thing.  And  in  this 
poem  the  representation  is  greatly  exaggerated.  What 
Sir  Aylmer  does  is  iniquitous,  more  because  of  the  cir- 
cumstances than  because  of  his  pride  of  birth  and  wealth, 
Ido  not  believe  that  theSquire  in  the  prologue  oiThe Prin- 
cess— "the  great  broad-shouldered  genial  Englishman" 
— would  have  yielded  Lilia  to  the  Parson's  brother,  with 
any  patience,  if  she  were  his  only  daughter  and  the  heir- 
ess of  his  lands.  But  Lilia's  father  would  not  have  been 
a  spy  on  his  daughter,  nor  thought  that  she  was  his  chat- 
tel ;  and  he  would  have  behaved  like  a  gentleman,  even 
when  he  dismissed  Leolin.  But  he  would  have  been  as 
proud  as  Sir  Aylmer,  only  in  a  more  sensible  way.  It  is  not 
really  pride  of  birth  which  Tennyson  attacks,  but  things 
in  the  man  which  do  not  belong  to  a  gentleman — ill-bred 
and  dishonourable  ways  of  acting — things  which  pride  of 
ancestry  would  forbid  another  man  to  do.  Tennyson's 
attack  is  not  really  levelled  against  the  class  or  its 
qualities,  but  against  a  discreditable  member  of  the 
class  ;  not  against  rank  and  privilege  or  pride  in  them, 
but  against  the  inhumanity,  the  meanness,  the  narrow 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    419 

conventions,  which  the  diseased  extreme  of  pride  of 
birth  produces  and  supports.  It  is  not,  to  take  another 
instance,  Lady  Clara  Vere  de  Vere's  pride  of  rank  to 
which  he  objects,  but  the  inhuman  ways  of  her  pride. 
Moreover,  as  a  poet — whose  heart,  always  moved  by 
pure  and  lovely  maidenhood,  kept  with  great  beauty  and 
devotion  his  youthful  ideal  of  womanhood  untouched 
and  unreproved,  and  who  shaped  it  in  many  sweet  and 
lovely  maids  with  a  delicate  tenderness  never  to  be 
forgotten — Tennyson  hated  the  tyranny  of  parents  who 
sold  their  daughters,  and  Aylmers  Field  and  many 
another  poem  record  his  steady  indignation  with  this 
iniquity. 

Sea  Dreams  (which  in  the  volume  of  1864  follows 
Aylmers  Field)  is  not  a  narrative  of  years  and  of 
many  characters,  but  of  a  single  day  in  the  life  of  a 
man  and  his  wife,  and  of  a  crisis  in  their  souls. 
The  man  is  a  city  clerk  who  has  been  cheated  of  all  his 
savings  by  a  hypocrite  ;  and  who  visits  the  seaside  with 
his  wife  and  infant  after  the  loss  has  fallen  upon  him. 
They  wander  on  the  shore,  and  at  evening  the  tide  rises 
with  a  huge  swell  and  thunder.  The  mighty  sound  flows 
through  their  sleep,  and,  with  their  circumstances, 
makes  their  dreams.  The  dreams  stir  their  hearts — his 
to  added  bitterness,  hers  to  solemn  thought — and  she 
asks  her  husband  to  forgive  the  injurer.  "  No,"  he  cries. 
"  No  ?  "  she  answers  ;  "  yet  the  robber  died  to-day.  I 
would  you  had  forgiven."    "  Why,"  he  replies,  "  because 


420  Tennyson 

he  is  dead,  should  I  forgive  ?  Yet,  for  the  child  sleeps 
sweetly,  and  that  you  may  happily  sleep,  I  do  forgive." 
That  is  the  little  tale,  but  few  poems  in  the  work  of 
Tennyson  are  done  with  a  finer  art,  or  built  up  with  a 
nobler  imagination.  Moreover  the  humanity,  in  both 
the  senses  of  the  word,  is  varied,  vivid,  wise,  and  tender. 
The  city  clerk,  gently  born  and  bred  ;  his  wife,  than  whom 
Tennyson  has  scarcely  drawn  a  more  gracious  woman — her 
grace  the  grace  of  Jesus  Christ — the  heated  preacher  who 
proclaims  the  overthrow  of  Babylon  ;  the  pious  cheat, 
"  so  false  he  partly  took  himself  for  true,"  and  the  happy 
little  child  whose  cradle  rocks  to  the  tune  of  a  song  that 
motherhood  herself  might  have  written — are  all  here, 
five  distinct  images  of  humanity.  Each  of  them  is 
touched  by  a  poet's  wisdom  of  love.  When  the  hypo- 
crite is  met  and  challenged  in  the  street,  the  clerk  looks 
after  him  and 

Among  the  honest  shoulders  of  the  crowd, 
Read  rascal  in  the  motions  of  his  back, 
And  scoundrel  in  the  supple-sliding  knee.* 

But,  scoundrel  as  he  is,  the  heavenly  pity  of  the  woman 
leads  us  to  pity  him  at  the  end. 

Not  less  clear  and  delicate,  in   another  kind,  is  this 

*  Mr.  Woolner,  talking  one  day  about  this  poem,  told  me  that 
when  he  was  making  his  bust  of  Carlyle,  a  man  well  known  on 
'Change  came  in,  and  that,  after  he  had  gone  away,  Carlyle  said, 
"That  man  is  a  rascal;  I  read  it  in  the  motions  of  his  back — a 
scoundrel  ;  did  you  see  his  supple-sliding  knee  ?  "  Woolner  told 
this  story  to  Tennyson,  and  Tennyson  reproduced  it  in  this  happy 
way.  Carlyle  was  right  ;  the  man,  a  few  years  afterwards,  was 
guilty  of  felony. 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    421 

lovely  pictrue  where  husband,  wife,  and  child  are  woven 
together  Into  one  love  in  the  silence  of  the  night. 

Saying  this, 
The  woman  half  turn'd  round  from  him  she  loved. 
Left  him  one  hand,  and  reaching  thro'  the  night 
Her  other,  found  (for  it  was  close  beside) 
And  half-embraced  the  basket  cradle-head 
With  one  soft  arm,  which,  like  the  pliant  bough 
That  moving  moves  the  nest  and  nestling,  sway'd 
The  cradle,  while  she  sang  this  baby  song — 

The  wisdom  of  love  in  the  forgiveness  of  injury  be- 
longs to  the  other  sense  of  the  word  humanity,  and  this 
humanity  pleading  for  gentleness  to  wrong-doing  is  the 
one  motive  which  makes  the  poetic  unity  of  this  poem. 
It  swells  into  fulness,  like  the  tide,  from  the  beginning 
to  the  end  of  Sea  Dreaftis.  It  is  in  the  heart  of  the 
woman  ;  its  contrast  is  seen  in  the  cruel  preacher,  its 
need  in  the  death  of  the  hypocrite,  its  victory  in  the  for- 
giveness which  the  injured  man  bestows  at  last,  its  clos- 
ing peace  in  the  sweet  sleep  of  husband,  wife,  and  child. 
Correlative  with  this,  and  binding  the  poem  into  unity 
by  its  all-pervading  presence  from  without,  as  forgive- 
ness by  its  presence  from  within,  is  the  fulness  of  the 
sea  which  everywhere  inundates  the  poem,  first  seen  by 
them  as  they  walked 

Lingering  about  the  thymy  promontories, 
Till  all  the  sails  were  darken'd  in  the  west 
And  rosed  in  the  east  ; 

then  heard,  and  waking  them  from  sleep,  when  the  full 
tide  rose,  breaking  on  the  cliffs  and  thundering  in  the 


422  Tennyson 

caves  ;  and  lastly,  seen  in  imagination,  full  watered, 
underneath  the  quiet  stars.  But  before  they  had  awak- 
ened, its  solemn  noise  had  entered  the  debatable  land 
between  slumber  and  waking,  and  made  their  dreams. 
The  dreams  are  woven  out  of  their  story  and  the  prob- 
lem of  life  that  belonged  to  it,  but  the  sea  is  their  crea- 
tor and  their  explainer.  Thus,  from  without,  the  Ocean 
Presence  makes  also  the  unity  of  the  poem.  The  man 
dreams  of  life  and  honest  work  and  of  his  speculation, 
in  a  beautiful  invention  through  which  the  sea  breathes 
and  flows.  But  the  wife,  since  her  soul  was  in  a  higher 
land,  dreamed  a  nobler  dream,  in  which  the  vast  tide, 
swelling  with  a  spheric  music,  surges  wave  after  wave 
on  cliffs  that  in  the  vision  take  the  form  of  huge  cathe- 
dral fronts  of  every  age,  and  breaks  them  down.  Un- 
derneath, among  their  ruins,  men  and  women  wrangled  ; 
but  their  "  wildest  wailings  "  (and  this  is  a  conception 
equally  noble  and  beautiful)  "  were  never  out  of  tune  " 
with  the  sweet  low  note  which  swelled  and  died  and 
swelled  again  in  the  belt  of  luminous  vapour,  whence 
the  billows  rolled  ashore  to  sweep  the  cathedral  fronts 
away.  Thus,  below  the  wrangle  of  creeds,  eternal  Love 
abides,  even  in  the  hearts  of  unloving  men.  At  last, 
only  the  Virgin  and  Child  remain  ;  and  though  they 
totter,  they,  like  the  love  they  represent,  are  not  seen  to 
fall.  That  dream,  quaintly  wrought  as  by  the  imagina- 
tion working  without  the  will,  in  sleep,  is  of  the  Ocean, 
worthy  of  the  Ocean's  soul,  and  worded  like  the  Ocean's 
voice. 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    423 

The  passage  is  too  long  to  quote,  but  there  are  few 
finer  things  in  the  literature  of  visions  of  the  sea,  save 
perhaps  the  dream  of  Wordsworth  recorded  in  the  fifth 
book  of  The  Prelude.  It  would  almost  seem  as  if 
Tennyson  had  built  his  dream  in  rivalry  of  Words- 
worth's ;  but  sublime  as  it  is,  Wordsworth's  is  more  sub- 
lime ;  and  well  composed  as  it  is,  W^ordsworth's  is  better 
composed.  The  sea  is  also  mighty  in  Wordsworth's 
vision,  and  the  barren  sands  on  which  he  fell  asleep  are 
changed  into  the  great  desert,  over  which  the  tide  en- 
croaches to  overwhelm  the  world.  The  Arab  rider  in  it 
is  born  out  of  Don  Quixote,  whose  adventures  the  poet 
was  reading,  and  the  stone  and  the  shell  the  Arab  holds 
in  his  hand  are  two  books,  two  great  universes  of  human 
power,  for  both  of  which  Wordsworth  had  the  highest 
reverence — the  universe  of  geometric  truth,  and  the 
universe  of  poetry — 

The  one  that  held  acquaintance  with  the  stars, 
And  wedded  soul  to  soul  in  purest  bond 
Of  reason,  undisturbed  by  space  or  time  ; 
The  other  that  was  a  god,  yea  many  gods, 
Had  voices  more  than  all  the  winds,  with  power 
To  exhilarate  the  spirit,  and  to  soothe 
Through  every  clime,  the  heart  of  human  kind. 

Meanwhile,  as  the  Arab  rode  to  save  these  two  books 
from  the  drowning  of  the  world,  and  the  poet  kept  pace 
with  him,  his  countenance  grew  more  disturbed — 

And,  looking  backwards  when  he  looked,  mine  eye 

Saw,  over  half  the  wilderness  diffused, 

A  bed  of  glittering  light  :  I  asked  the  cause  : 


424  Tennyson 

"  It  IS,"  said  he,  "  the  waters  of  the  deep 
Gathering  upon  us  "  ;  quickening  then  the  pace 
Of  the  unwieldly  creature  he  bestrode. 
He  left  me  :  I  called  after  him  aloud  ; 
He  heeded  not  ;  but,  with  his  twofold  charge 
Still  in  his  grasp,  before  me,  full  in  view. 
Went  hurrying  o'er  the  illimitable  waste. 
With  the  fleet  waters  of  a  drowning  world 
In  chase  of  him  ;  whereat  I  waked  in  terror. 
And  saw  the  sea  before  me,  and  the  book, 
In  which  I  had  been  reading,  at  my  side. 

Both  dreams  are  raised  into  sublimity  by  the  thoughts 
they  represent,  and  both  illustrate  the  powers  of  Words- 
worth and  Tennyson  when  they  are  writing  at  a  high 
pitch  of  imaginative  insight. 

There  are  two  other  great  sea-dreams  in  English 
poetry.  One  is  the  vision  of  Clarence,  far  the  most 
splendid  and  passionate  as  poetry  ;  the  other  is  the 
vision  of  the  bottom  of  the  great  deep  in  the  Prometheus 
Unbound — a  magnificent  enlargement  of  the  dream  of 
Clarence.  But  by  weight  of  thought  and  height  of  aim, 
thrilled,  as  both  of  them  are,  by  sympathy  with  the 
wants  of  mankind,  the  sea-dreams  of  Wordsworth  and 
Tennyson  are  greater  than  Shelley's,  and  may  even  stand 
side  by  side  with  Shakespeare's,  not  by  their  poetic,  but 
by  their  intellectual  fire. 

To  return  to  Tennyson  :  this  poem  illustrates  the 
range  of  his  power.  He  passes  easily  from  this  large 
vision  of  the  great  deep  of  Eternal  Love,  destroying 
those  impermanent  forms  of  religion  over  which  men 
quarrel,  to  the  small  and  quiet  picture,  at  the  close,  of 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    425 

the  cradled  infant  and  the  mother.  Few  would  dare  to 
set  them  together,  still  fewer  would  have  had  the  power 
to  write  both  so  perfectly. 

We  have  a  much  fuller  example  of  this  variety  of 
range  in  the  poem  of  The  Brook.  It  also  is  knit  to- 
gether into  its  brief  space  with  delightful  skill.  Law- 
rence Aylmer,  after  twenty  years  of  absence,  returning 
from  the  East  to  see  his  native  place,  stays  his  steps  at  a 
stile,  beside  the  babbling  brook  which  joins  the  river 
near  old  Philip's  farm.  There,  he  remembers  his 
younger  brother,  the  poet  who  died,  but  who  sang  the 
rhyme  of  the  brook  he  now  recalls.  There,  too,  he  re- 
members Katie  Willows,  Philip's  daughter,  for  whose 
petitioning  grace  of  sweet  seventeen  he  endured  old 
Philip's  chatter  for  many  hours,  that  she  might  have 
time  to  make  up  her  quarrel  with  her  lover  James — till, 
returning,  worn  with  talk,  he  found 

the  sun  of  sweet  content 
Re-risen  in  Katie's  eyes,  and  all  things  well. 

And  then  he  thinks  how  all  are  gone — Philip  dead  ;  his 
brother  dead  ;  Katie  and  James  away  in  Australia — and 
bows  his  head  over  the  brook. 

The  story  is  thus  happily  and  easily  wrought,  but  the 
end  shows  even  greater  skill.  He  lifts  his  eyes  and  sees 
Katie  over  again  come  to  him  along  the  path,  and  all 
the  twenty  years  fade  away.  Amazed,  and  like  one  who 
half  waking  feels  a  glimmering  strangeness  in  his  dream, 
he  cries 


426  Tennyson 

'*  Too  happy,  fresh  and  fair, 
Too  fresh  and  fair  in  our  sad  world's  best  bloom. 
To  be  the  ghost  of  one  who  bore  your  name 
About  these  meadows,  twenty  years  ago." 

*'  Have  you  not  heard  ? "    said  Katie,  "  we  came  back, 
We  bought  the  farm  we  tenanted  before. 
Am  I  so  like  her?  so  they  said  on  board." 

And  the  daughter  brings  him  in  to  be  welcomed  by  the 
mother  in  the  ancient  farm.  So  does  the  poet  bring  the 
past  and  present  into  one,  and  leave  the  solitary  man 
among  old  friends.  It  is  an  end  imagined  with  much 
grace,  and  it  brings  the  whole  into  a  pretty  unity. 
Moreover,  as  the  sea,  swelling  through  Sea  Dreams, 
binds  that  poem,  from  without,  into  unity  by  its  uni- 
versal presence,  so  here  the  brook,  glancing,  glimmering, 
and  singing  everywhere,  runs  through  the  poem  and 
harmonises  it  and  all  the  twenty  years  into  one  happy 
thing. 

The  form  of  the  poem  is  built  on  one  of  those  pleas- 
ant motives  taken  from  simple  things  in  the  far  past,  the 
charm  of  which  we  do  not  feel  at  the  time,  but  which, 
having  been  full  of  humanity,  are  enchanting  to  remem- 
brance. We  recall  them,  and  are  young  again  ;  the 
years  of  monotonous  struggle  glide  away,  and  we  love 
what  we  did,  and  what  we  were.  And  if  by  chance  we 
recollect  these  events  amid  the  same  landscape  in  which 
they  took  place,  the  illusion,  and  all  the  emotion  that 
attends  it,  are  deepened — for  Nature  has  not  changed, 
and  we  seem  for  the  moment  as  unchanged  as  Nature. 
So  Lawrence  Aylmer  felt,  seeing  the  same  flowers  as  of 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    427 

old,  hearing  the  brook  make  the  same  music.  Again 
Katie  tells  him  her  story  ;  again  he  sees  James  wading 
through  the  meadow  ;  again  he  hears  old  Philip  chatter- 
ing in  his  ear ;  again  he  bids  his  brother  farewell. 
Twenty  years  have  vanished  !  How  fair,  how  delightful 
life  was  long  ago  ! 

This  is  a  frequent  way  of  Tennyson's  ;  tales  told  years 
after  the  events,  and  veiled  in  the  dewy  glimmer  of 
memory.  It  was  so  he  made  The  Gardener  s  Daughter 
and  The  Miller's  Daughter.  It  was  so  he  sang  The 
Grandmother.  It  was  so  he  made  one  of  the  tenderest  of 
his  smaller  poems,  revisiting  a  place  where  he  had 
known  his  friend,  and  weaving  into  his  recollection,  as 
in  The  Brook,  the  voice  and  the  swiftness,  the  beauty 
and  the  colour  of  the  waters  of  the  earth.  Who  does 
not  remember  In  the  Valley  of  Cauteretz,  with  its  rhythm 
that  flows  with  the  flowing  of  the  river  ? 

All  along  the  valley,  stream  that  flashes!  white, 

Deepening  thy  voice  with  the  deepening  of  the  night, 

All  along  the  valley,  where  thy  waters  flow, 

I  walk'd  with  one  I  loved  two  and  thirty  years  ago. 

All  along  the  valley,  while  I  walk'd  to-day. 

The  two  and  thirty  years  were  a  mist  that  rolls  away  ; 

For  all  along  the  valley,  down  thy  rocky  bed, 

Thy  living  voice  to  me  was  as  the  voice  of  the  dead, 

And  all  along  the  valley,  by  rock  and  cave  and  tree, 

The  voice  of  the  dead  was  a  living  voice  to  me. 

There  is  yet  a  word  to  say  about  the  grace  of  this 
poem,  but  I  must  not  forget  its  portraiture.  Here  the 
portraits  are  all  woven  together  by  the  feeling  of  the 
man  who  makes  them.     Lawrence  Aylmer  sees  them  all 


428  Tennyson 

through  his  own  character,  and  his  individual  emotion 
secures  them  into  unity.  But  they  could  scarcely  be 
better  done.  The  young  poet,  his  brother — who  thought 
money  a  dead  thing, 

Yet  himself  could  make 
The  thing  that  is  not  as  the  thing  that  is  ; 

who  had  only  begun  to  feel  his  life,  like  that  time  which 
goes  before  the  leaf. 

When  all  the  wood  stands  in  the  mist  of  green, 
And  nothing  perfect ; 

whose  "  primrose  fancies "  made  the  rippling  song  of 
the  brook — could  not  be  more  briefly  or  more  clearly 
sketched.  Then  we  see  Katie  Willows,  who  never  ran, 
but  moved — 

A  little  flutter'd,  with  her  eyelids  down, 
Fresh  apple-blossom,  blushing  for  a  boon. 

Straight,  but  as  lissome  as  a  hazel  wand  ; 
Her  eyes  a  bashful  azure,  and  her  hair 
In  gloss  and  hue  the  chestnut,  when  the  shell 
Divides  threefold  to  show  the  fruit  within. 

And  with  them  both  stands  forth  the  English  farmer, 
of  whom  Tennyson  paints  so  many  types.  We  hear 
with  our  very  ears  old  Philip  babbling  of  his  stock,  his 
dogs,  of  Sir  Arthur's  deer  that  in  Darnley  Chase 

in  copse  and  fern 
Twinkled  the  innumerable  ear  and  tail  ; 

of  his  colt  and  all  its  pedigree  ;  of  his  bargain  with  the 


Aylmer's  Field,  Sea  Dreams,  The  Brook    429 

bailiff  who  in  a  line  or  two  is  flashed  into  life  before  us 
as  clearly  as  the  farmer.  Then  one  final  picture  of 
Katie's  daughter,  coming  with  a  low  breath  of  tender 
air  that  makes  tremble  in  the  hedge 

The  fragile  bindweed-bells  and  briony  rings, 

fills  the  frame  with  youthful  freshness  and  re-creates  the 
love-story  at  the  beginning  of  the  tale.  All  different, 
all  excellent,  these  many  portraits  adorn  and  make  alive 
this  little  poem. 

Finally,  no  poem  of  this  class  is  more  graceful.  It 
also  is  in  a  new  style.  I  remember  nothing  like  it. 
Only  a  double-natured  man  like  Tennyson,  delicate  and 
rugged,  could  have  written  it.  The  farmer  is  done  by 
the  farmer  in  Tennyson  ;  but  when  we  lay  him  aside, 
all  the  rest  is  as  graceful  as  the  scenery.  The  music  of 
the  brook  is  everywhere.  The  music  of  pleasant  human 
love  is  also  everywhere.  The  poet-boy  fills  it  with  un- 
worldliness.  The  girl  is  happy  in  it,  and  her  youth  and 
love  make  it  like  a  summer  day.  And  even  were  these 
gracious,  pretty,  light  emotions  gone,  we  could  not  resist 
the  charm  of  the  brook,  that,  coming  from  the  tarn  far 
away  amongst  the  hills,  and  singing  all  the  way,  passes 
by  Philip's  farm  to  join  the  brimming  river.  We  follow 
it,  as  if  we  walked  with  it  from  its  fountains,  by  streets 
and  town  and  bridge,  by  field  and  fallow  ;  and  the  gay 
rhythm  of  the  song  dances  with  its  chatter  and  glitters 
with  its  sun  and  shade.  Nor  does  it  want  a  momentary 
thought  to  give   it   some  sympathy  with  humanity,  some 


430 


Tennyson 


remembrance  of  us  who  company  its  waters  with  our 
fleeting  joy  and  with  our  steady  sorrow — 

For  men  may  come  and  men  may  go. 
But  I  go  on  for  ever. 

For,  indeed,  with  all  its  sunny  grace — there  is  also  a 
little  air  of  human  sorrow,  which,  like  a  delicate  mist, 
faintly  sleeps  above  the  poem,  and  softening  its  outlines, 
harmonises  all. 


CHAPTER    XIII 
THE   DRAMATIC    MONOLOGUES 

TENNYSON  calls  his  Locksley  Hall,  or  Sixty  Years 
After,  a  "  dramatic  monologue,"  and  it  is  a  good 
name  to  give  to  a  whole  series  of  his  poems,  the 
"  trick  "  of  which  I  do  not  quite  say  he  invented,  but 
which  he  wrought  into  forms  so  specially  his  own,  that 
they  stand  apart  from  work  of  a  similar  kind  in  other 
poets.  Browning  also  made  monologues  of  this  kind. 
They,  too,  had  their  own  qualities  and  manner,  and  were 
exceedingly  various  in  metre.  Browning's  mind  was 
filled  with  so  great  a  crowd  of  various  men  and  women, 
and  of  so  many  different  times  and  countries,  that  he 
was  forced,  in  order  to  realise  their  differences,  into 
many  different  metrical  movements.  Tennyson,  on  the 
contrary,  not  conceiving  so  many  types  as  Browning,  is 
satisfied,  on  the  whole,  with  one  long,  six-accented 
metre,  with  many  trisyllables. 

The  dramatic  monologues  of  Browning  are  sometimes 
lyrical,  sometimes  narrative,  sometimes  reflective,  some- 
times heroic,  poetry.    The  poetic  form  in  which  Tennyson 

431 


432  Tennyson 

composed  his  monologues  scarcely  varies  at  all.  It  is 
an  excellent  manner  for  his  purpose,  and  having  found  it, 
he  clung  to  it.  One  man  or  woman  speaks,  telling  a  tale 
of  the  past  or  of  the  present.  Another  person — and 
here  the  dramatic  element  enters — is  supposed  to  be 
near  at  hand,  but  we  only  know  what  he  says  by  the 
speaker  repeating  a  part  of  what  he  has  heard  and  reply- 
ing to  it ;  and  we  only  know  of  his  presence  by  all  that 
is  said  being  addressed  to  him.  The  poor  woman  in 
Rizpah  speaks  to  her  visitor  ;  the  Northern  Farmer  to 
his  servant. 

This  is  Tennyson's  form  of  the  dramatic  monologue, 
and  it  is  wrought  out  with  great  skill  and  effectiveness. 
It  is  an  easy  form  to  work  in,  the  easiest  of  all  ;  and  it  is 
characteristic  of  Tennyson's  love  of  the  simple  that  he 
should  choose  the  easiest.  The  form  being  easy  to  write 
in,  the  work  inevitably  tends  to  become,  in  inartistic 
hands,  slovenly,  long-winded,  and  unforceful.  In  Tenny- 
son's hands,  on  the  contrary,  it  is  of  the  most  robust, 
careful,  concentrated  kind.  It  is  extremely  rare  when 
anything  weak  intrudes,  or  when  the  edge  of  the  mean- 
ing is  not  quite  sharp  and  clear.  Any  failure  in  excel- 
lence is  more  due  to  certain  elements  in  the  subject, 
chiefly  controversial,  and  which  were  better  excluded, 
than  to  the  work  itself. 

It  must,  however,  be  remembered  that  the  power  of 
writing  a  good  dramatic  monologue  does  not  include  the 
power  of  writing  a  good  drama.  I  doubt  very  much 
whether   even    Shakspere    could   have   written    a    good 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  433 

dramatic   monologue.     He  could  not  have   kept  to  the 
single  character.     The  pull  in  his  soul  towards  the  crea- 
tion of  more  men  and  women  would  have  been  too  much 
for  him-     On  the  other  hand,  the  creator  of  a  good  dra- 
matic monologue  is  not  likely  to  be  a  good  dramatist. 
Of  course,  he  may  have  that  power,  but  I  remember  no 
case  of  it.     The  habit  of  mind  by  which  a  poet  creates, 
as  in  a  dramatic  monologue,  one  vivid  personality  out  of 
himself  is  so  totally  different  from  the  habit  of  creating 
a  number  of  personalities,  all  of  whom  the  dramatist  con- 
ceives as  apart  from  himself,  that  it  is  not  probable  one 
man    will    have  both   habits   of   mind.      Moreover,   the 
power  of  drawing  one  man  in  one  set  of  circumstances  is 
very  different   from  the  power  of  drawing  a  number  of 
characters    clashing    together    in    circumstances   which 
are  continually  changing.     The  writer  of  the  dramatic 
monologue  is  likely  to  keep  to  his  habit  if  he  take  to  the 
drama,  and  all  his  characters  will  tend  to  express  them- 
selves in  monologue.     Changing    circumstances  will  not 
modify  their   speech    or   their   action    as  much  as  they 
ought  to  do.     At   root,  all    the    characters  will   be    the 
poet  ;  we  shall  detect  him  everywhere  ;  nor  will  there  be 
enough  distinction  between  the  characters  to  make  the 
play  interesting,  the   action    dramatic,    the    personages 
alive  enough,  or  the   catastrophe   a  necessity.      This  is 
true  of  all  Tennyson's,  and,  in  a  lesser  degree,  of  Brown- 
ing's   dramas.       The   Northern    Farmer,    the   Northern 
Cobbler,  the  second  Northern   Farmer,  the  village  wife 

in  The  Entail,  are  all  keenly  alive.     But  I  do  not  believe 
28 


434  Tennyson 

that  Tennyson  could  have  brought  these  four  into  a 
drama,  and  driven  them,  by  their  characters  hurtling  to- 
gether, to  a  necessary  conclusion  ;  or  invented,  with 
excellence,  the  mutual  play  which  should  lead  to  that 
conclusion.  In  this,  the  highest  of  all  the  creative  forms 
of  poetry,  he  would  have  broken  down  ;  and  he  always 
did  break  down  when  he  tried.  The  fact  is  that,  for 
drama,  his  own  personality  was  too  much  with  him  ;  he 
could  not  get  rid  of  it.  But  the  great  dramatist  can 
divest  himself  of  his  personality.  His  personages  have 
their  own  characters,  not  his.  He  has  lost  himself  in 
making  them.  I  might  even  say  that  his  will  does  not 
order  their  action  ;  it  is  rather  the  meeting  of  the  various 
characters,  under  the  circumstances,  which  makes  the 
conclusion  inevitable.  He  invents,  it  is  true,  the  cir- 
cumstances, but  his  personages  do  not  act  as  he  would 
act ;  they  follow  their  separate  bents  ;  independent,  as 
it  were,  of  his  will.  And  so  apart  from  him  are  they,  so 
little  is  he  in  them  as  a  character,  that  I  can  conceive, 
to  put  it  paradoxically,  that  he  might  be  unaware  of 
what  they  are  going  to  do.  The  true  dramatist  sits  out- 
side of  his  characters. 

This  is  the  highest  kind  of  creation.  Such  a  creator 
is  the  true  Prometheus.  He  makes  men  and  women 
who  are  not  himself.  But  this  is  not  the  kind  of 
work  Tennyson  or  Browning  could  do.  We  hear  the 
individuality  of  their  maker  in  all  the  personages  of 
their  dramas  say.  We  see  the  aims  of  their  maker,  his 
tricks  of  mental  attitude,  his  theories  of  life,  in  all  they 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  435 

do.  The  untrue  dramatist  sits  inside  of  all  his  charac- 
ters. Both  Browning  and  Tennyson  ought  to  have  kept 
to  dramatic  monologue,  or  to  such  a  variation  of  dra- 
matic monologue  as  Pippa  Passes,  which  no  one  can 
call  a  drama.  All  the  same,  it  is  necessary  to  say, 
though  not  here  to  dwell  on,  that  Browning  has 
made  a  far  more  successful  attempt  at  drama  than 
Tennyson. 

Once  more,  in  a  drama  the  characters  speak  no  more 
when  the  conclusion  arrives.  The  dramatist  therefore 
always  looks  to  the  future.  He  is  anxious  that  his  char- 
acters should  play  together  towards  a  far-off  end  ;  that 
every  one  of  them  should  minister  his  own  part  to  the 
end  ;  that  each  man's  part  should  illuminate  the  parts 
of  all  the  others.  All  his  interests  look  forward.  But 
in  the  dramatic  monologue  there  is  no  forward  look  ; 
nothing  has  to  be  made  for  a  distant  end  or  fitted  to  it. 
What  has  been  in  the  past  or  what  is  actually  doing  in 
the  present  is  described,  and  to  write  of  the  past  or  the 
present  is,  of  course,  much  easier  than  to  compose  a 
changing  succession  of  events  and  varying  emotions 
towards  a  close  in  the  future.  It  needs  twice  the  genius 
to  write  a  good  drama  that  it  takes  to  write  a  good 
dramatic  monologue ;  but,  unfortunately,  those  who 
have  so  much  of  the  dramatic  instinct  as  to  be  able  to 
write  a  dramatic  monologue  persuade  themselves  with 
great  rapidity  that  they  can  write  a  drama.  It  thor- 
oughly disturbs  me  when  I  think  what  a  series  of  little 
masterpieces  of  dramatic  monologue  we  might  have  had 


436  Tennyson 

if  Tennyson  had  not  spent  so  many  years  in  writing 
dramas. 

The  *'  dramatic  monologues,"  a  few  examples  of  which 
I  select — since  it  is  not  possible  to  write  of  them  all — 
belong  directly  to  the  tragedy  and  to  the  comedy  of  life. 
Rizpah,  Despair^  The  First  Quarrel,  are  examples  of  the 
first.  All  the  dialect  poems  are  examples  of  the  second. 
There  is  another  class  which  can  scarcely  be  called 
tragedy  or  comedy,  the  speaker  in  which  reviews  the 
whole  of  his  life,  or  one  event  in  it,  and  with  a  certain 
social  or  ethical  direction.  Of  these,  Lockslcy  Hall,  or 
Sixty  Years  After,  is  one  example,  and  The  Wreck  is 
another.  Each  of  them  also  reveals  and  explains  a 
typical  character,  but  the  individual  is  not  lost  in  the 
generalisation.  Tennyson's  speakers  are  specialised 
enough  to  separate  them  from  other  persons  of  the  same 
kind.  The  Northern  Farmer,  though  he  represents  a 
class,  is  his  own  delightful  self.  When  he  died,  he  left 
no  one  behind  who  was  exactly  he,  though  he  left  a 
number  of  men  who  were  like  him.  The  general  lines 
of  the  Northern  Cobbler's  position  are  the  same  as  those 
of  many  reformed  drinkers,  but  no  one  but  himself 
could  have  set  up  the  bottle  in  the  window,  or  declared 
that  he  would  take  it  with  him  after  death,  like  a  Norse 
warrior  his  sword,  before  the  throne.  We  possess  the 
type  in  these  poems  of  Tennyson,  but  we  have  also  the 
individual. 

It  would  be  wrong  also  not  to  speak  of  the  variety 
and  range  of  the  characters  represented.     We  pass  from 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  437 

the  aged  squire,  whose  youth  was  full  of  fire  and  whose 
age  is  full  of  the  ashes  of  that  fire,  to  the  woman  who 
has  forsaken  husband  and  child  and  found  a  love  which 
satisfied  her  soul,  but  whose  love  and  life  are  wrecked. 
We  stand  on  the  sea-shore  with  the  working  man  who 
has  been  driven  by  misery  and  false  creeds  into  suicide, 
and  sit  by  the  bedside  of  the  mother  whose  son  was 
hanged,  and  whose  awful  love  gathered  and  buried  his 
bones.  The  seaman's  wife,  the  bandit's  bride,  the  Irish 
girl,  the  hospital  nurse,  the  ruined  girl  and  her  merciful 
rival,  the  farmer,  the  cobbler,  the  sick  child,  the  village 
gossip,  are  all  created.  Almost  every  class  of  society  is 
laid  under  contribution  in  stories  which  range  from  the 
black  tragedy  of  Rizpah  to  the  light  comedy  of  The 
Spinster's  Sweet- arts. 

The  first  of  these  I  choose  is  Locksley  Hall,  or  Sixty 
Years  After,  and  I  connect  it  with  the  Locksley  Hall 
which  appeared  in  1842.  That  poem  stirred  the  whole 
of  England  into  a  new  sensation.  We  can  scarcely  call 
it  a  "  dramatic  monologue,"  but  it  held  this  form  of 
poetry  within  it,  and  went  to  its  verge.  We  might  even 
say  that  a  dramatic  movement  is  played  in  the  hero's 
soul,  in  which  three  or  four  aspects  of  his  nature  take 
personality  one  after  another,  the  lover,  the  betrayed 
lover,  the  curser  of  his  time,  the  man  who  reacts  with 
anger  from  his  disillusion  and  his  cursing,  and  the  one 
man  who  is  looking  back  on  all  the  phases  through 
which  he  has  passed.  In  whatever  aspect  we  see  him, 
he  is  the  young  man.      Youth  flames   throughout   the 


438  Tennyson 

poem  ;  youth  wandering  on  the  shore,  clinging  to  the 
present,  dipping  into  the  future,  while  he 

Saw  the  Vision  of  the  world,  and  all  the  wonder  that  would 
be; 

youth  breaking  with  the  spring  into  love  and  into  lovely 
imagining  of  love  ;  youth  raging  at  his  sweetheart's 
falseness,  at  her  husband,  at  society  ;  youth  remember- 
ing its  "  wild  pulsation "  before  it  entered  into  life ; 
youth  exaggerating  its  sorrow,  yearning  to  burst  away 
from  convention  ;  youth  ashamed  of  its  bluster,  and 
emerging  from  it  into  resolution  ;  youth  flinging  love  to 
the  winds  and  taking  to  science  ;  youth  bidding  good- 
bye to  the  past,  and  devoting  it  to  desolation  and  to 
tempest  in  a  new  rush  of  wrath  ;  and  finally  going 
fiercely  into  the  sea  of  manhood — with  the  roaring  wind. 
For  so  it  ends  : 

Howsoever  these  things  be,  a  long  farewell  to  Locksley  Hall ! 
Now  for  me  the  woods  may  wither,  now  for  me  the  roof-tree 
fall. 

Comes  a  vapour  from  the  margin,  blackening  over  heath  and 

holt, 
Cramming  all  the  blast  before  it,  in  its  breast  a  thunder-bolt. 

Let  it  fall  on  Locksley  Hall,  with  rain  or  hail,  or  fire  or  snow  ; 
For  the  mighty  wind  arises,  roaring  seaward,  and  1  go. 

Was  there  ever  anything  more  youthful?  It  touched 
everything  that  was  young  in  England  and  gave  it  voice. 
The  very  scenery  is  full  of  the  things  which  charm  the 
young — the  stars,  the  copses  ringing  with  the  birds,  the 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  439 

colours  deepening  on  their  breast  in  spring  ;  the  curlew's 
cry  ;  the  stately  ships  going  by  on  the  sea  ;  the  roaring 
cataracts  of  the  ocean  ridges  thundering  on  the  sands ; 
the  vision  of  the  tropics.  Take  the  stars — a  new,  clear 
voice,  unheard  before,  echoes  in  these  lines — 

Many  a  night  from  yonder  ivied  casement,  ere  I  went  to  rest. 
Did  I  look  on  great  Orion  sloping  slowly  to  the  West. 

Many  a  night  I  saw  the  Pleiads,  rising  thro'  the  mellow  shade, 
Glitter  like  a  swarm  of  fire-flies  tangled  in  a  silver  braid. 

And  yet,  with  all  this  efflorescence  of  youth,  which  in 
its  very  exaggeration  makes  the  central  excellence  of 
the  poem,  a  curious  steadiness  of  thought  and  a  restrained 
force  of  wording,  such  as  belong  to  established  man- 
hood, pervade  it  also.  There  are  many  lines  which  have 
become  household  words,  which,  while  young  in  their 
expression,  have  also  the  fulness  of  maturity, — and  to 
write  these  and  to  know  that  one  had  written  them  along 
with  all  the  youthful  verse,  must  have  given  Tennyson 
the  supreme  consciousness  that  he  was  a  poet  who  had  a 
whole  world  before  him  ;  and  he  told  England  this  in  a 
single  line — 

Yearning  for  the  large  excitement  that  the  coming  years  would 
yield. 

Sixty  years  pass  by,  and  the  young  man  is  old,  and 
Tennyson  tells  in  a  true  dramatic  monologue  what  the 
youth  has  become.  It  is  a  marvellous  study  to  be  writ- 
ten by  a  man  over  eighty  years  of  age.  He  had  now 
come   to   such  years   as  "  llie  many-wintered  crow  that 


440  Tennyson 

leads  the  clanging  rookery  home  "  ;  but  the  poetic  force 
in  this  poem  has  a  constant  volume.  The  rhythm  is  as 
fine  as  in  the  days  long  past.     Here  is  one  example — 

Robed  in  universal  harvest  up  to  either  pole  she  smiles, 
Universal  Ocean  softly  washing  all  her  warless  Isles. 

The  poem  is  somewhat  too  long,  but  even  that  may  have 
been  the  poet's  intention.  He  had  to  represent  age,  and 
age  is  garrulous.  And  the  image  of  old  age  is  as  clear 
and  true  in  this  Locksley  Hall  as  the  image  of  youth  is 
in  its  predecessor.  We  might  work  out  from  the  poem 
all  the  characteristics  of  an  old  man — from  babbling 
anger  to  soft  forgiveness,  from  many-passioned  memory 
to  pathetic  expectation  of  the  world  to  come.  All  is 
age,  and  an  age  which,  even  in  its  petulance  and  preju- 
dice, is  to  be  loved  and  honoured.  The  more  I  read  the 
poem,  the  more  I  think  it  worthy  of  respect  as  a  work 
of  art. 

Many,  like  myself,  will  dislike  its  views  about  man 
and  the  future  of  man.  They  are  the  views  of  a  half- 
pessimist  tempered  by  belief  in  immortality.  But  no 
one  has  at  all  the  right  to  say  that  they  are  the  views  of 
Tennyson.  He  had  created  a  certain  type  of  character 
in  the  young  man  of  the  poem  of  1842,  and  though  he 
himself  enters  into  this  young  man,  it  is  only  when  he 
is  expressing  the  general  joy  and  impulsiveness  of  youth. 
The  real  representative  of  Tennyson  in  1842  is  the  Ulys- 
ses, and  Ulysses  is  wholly  different  from  the  old  or  the 
young  man  in  both  the  Lockslcy  Halls.     Tennyson  shows 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  441 

in  the  later  poem  into  what  the  special  character  of  the 
hero  of  the  earlier  poem  was  likely  to  grow  after  sixty 
years  had  fled  away.  It  would  not  be  just  to  affirm  that 
he  is  painting  himself,  as  some  have  said  ;  the  subject 
infers  that  he  is  creating  another  man. 

The  young  man  took  to  science  to  relieve  his  mind 
of  love's  illusion.  It  was  no  wonder  then  that,  given 
his  temperament,  he  found  himself  in  a  sea  of  disap- 
pointment. He  has  not  taken  to  work  for  man  save  on 
his  estate  ;  he  has  isolated  himself  with  a  wife  and  in  his 
country-house,  and  he  has  continued  to  brood  over  the 
ills  of  the  world  at  a  distance  from  them.  He  remains 
as  much  locked  up  in  himself  as  he  was  before.  Had 
he  had  more  sympathy  with  the  movement  of  the  world, 
he  might  have  seen  some  good,  even  in  the  revolu- 
tionists and  the  jabberers.  He  himself,  exactly  as  in 
his  youth,  does  not  refrain  from  noise  as  loud  as  that 
made  by  those  whom  he  denounces.  He  cries,  like 
Carlyle,  against  mere  speech,  and  sins,  like  Carlyle,  by 
an  overflow  of  language  ;  sickening  at  the  lawless  din, 
unaware  that  his  own  din  is  even  more  lawless,  and 
overwhelming  his  grandson  with  "  Chaos,  Cosmos  !  Cos- 
mos, Chaos,"  and  with  all  the  wailing  and  screaming  of 
the  pessimists — a  noise  a  thousandfold  worse  for  man- 
kind, or  for  a  man  to  make,  than  the  noise  of  all  the 
mob-orators  of  the  world.  It  is  precisely  what  the  young 
fellow  of  the  first  Locksley  Hall  would  grow  into,  if  he 
lived  apart  from  men  and  kept  an  edge  of  poetry  in 
him — enough   to  make  him   shudder  at  all  the  evil   of 


442  Tennyson 

wliich  he  hears,  but  not  enough  to  drive  him  into  ac 
tual  contention  with  it.  Tliis  is  tempered,  as  I  said, 
by  belief  in  immortality,  and  in  evolution.  The  im- 
mortality will  set  the  poor  wretches  of  this  cruel  universe 
right  in  the  world  to  come,  but  it  holds  out  no  i)resent 
hope  for  this  world.  And  evolution  ?  Evolution  has 
moved  us  into  higher  life  wath  such  an  infinite  slowness 
in  the  past  that  we  can  only  expect  a  better  world  on 
earth,  if  we  can  dare  to  expect  it  at  all,  when  jeon  after 
seon  has  passed  away.  At  last,  out  of  this  crying  of 
despair,  mingled  with  the  pathetic  forgiveness  and  the 
pathetic  memories  of  personal  life,  arises  a  hidden  hope, 
at  which,  if  he  had  wrought,  he  would  not  have  come  to 
so  sorrowful  an  age — "  Love  will  conquer  at  the  last," 
and  the  poem  ends  with  an  excellent  morality.  But  the 
man,  we  feel,  will  yet  need  to  reverse  himself  in  the 
world  to  come.  It  is  a  masterly  study — a  wonderful 
thing  for  Tennyson  to  have  written  at  an  age  when  most 
men  are  somewhat  too  inactive  in  mind  to  be  able  to 
pass  out  of  themselves,  and  for  a  time  to  enter  into  the 
soul  of  another. 

The  final  question  one  asks  about  it  is  :  Was  it  worth 
doing  at  all  ?  Was  it  worth  a  poet's  while  to  flood  the 
world  with  all  this  wailing  music,  to  depress  mankind 
who  is  depressed  enough,  to  picture  so  much  ill  and  so 
little  good,  to  fall  into  a  commonplace  realism,  to  seem 
to  make  the  querulous  hopelessness  of  the  character  he 
draws  the  measure  of  the  future  of  mankind  ?  It  was  not 
worth  a  poet's  while  ;  and  I  wish,  in  spite  of  the  excel- 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  443 

lence  of  the  work,  that  he  had  not  taken  the  subject 
at  all. 

The  next  of  these  dramatic  monologues  I  select  as  an 
example  is  The  Northern  Farmer.  It  is  a  vivid  piece 
out  of  the  great  comedy  of  man,  not  of  its  mere  mirtli, 
but  of  that  elemental  humorousness  of  things  which 
belongs  to  the  lives  of  the  brutes  as  well  as  to  ourselves, 
that  steady  quaintness  of  the  ancient  earth  and  all  who 
are  born  of  her,  which  first  made  men  smile,  and  which 
has  enabled  us  to  bear  our  pain  better,  and  to  love  one 
another  more,  than  might  appear  possible  in  a  world 
where  Nature  generally  seems  to  be  doing  her  best  to 
hurt  us  first,  and  then  to  kill  us.  This  kind  of  elemental 
humour  rarely  emerges  in  the  educated  classes,  except 
when  we  have  scraped  off  all  their  conventions  and  got 
down  to  the  rough  grain  of  humanity,  but  is  continually 
met  in  the  peasant  and  farmer  class  ;  and,  curiously 
enough,  it  was  the  only  kind  of  true  humour  that  Ten- 
nyson possessed.  There  was  always  in  him,  behind  his 
delicate  grace  and  educated  charm,  a  piece  of  rugged, 
wild,  uncultured  human  nature,  such  as  might  belong  to 
a  peasant — a  portion  of  man  just  as  he  emerged  from 
being  a  part  of  wild  Nature — which  often  gave  an  extra- 
ordinary depth  and  force  to  the  lovelier  parts  of  his 
poetry,  but  which  also  enabled  him  to  write  these  dialect 
poems  in  a  way  no  other  poet  has  approached. 

The  Northern  Farmer  is  the  finest  of  them  all.  There 
never  was  a  more  superbly  hewn  piece  of  rough  and 
vital    sculpture.      What    Michael    Angelo    did    for   the 


444  Tennyson 

Prophet  Amos  into  whose  writings  entered  the  herds- 
man, Tennyson  has  done  for  this  farmer,  with  a  chisel 
as  vivid  and  as  bold.  He  is  the  very  genius  of  ancient 
agriculture,  and  seems  born  out  of  the  fruitful  bosom  of 
Mother  Earth.  He  breathes  and  smells  of  the  earth, 
and  the  earth  speaks  by  his  voice.  When  he  tells  how 
he  stubbed  Thurnaby  waste  and  rumbled  out  of  it  the 
boggle  and  the  stones  together,  and  made  grass  of  the 
bracken  and  whin,  it  is  the  lover  of  the  Earth  who  tells 
us  how  she  desires  to  be  handled.  When  he  says  that 
God  Almighty  scarcely  knows  what  He  is  doing  when 
He  takes  him  away,  it  is  the  rude  Teuton  tiller  of  the 
land  who  speaks,  who  ploughed  the  land  with  one  hand 
and  fought  the  Roman  with  the  other,  and  who  wor- 
shipped Thor,  the  farmer's  friend.  His  first  duty  is  to 
the  land  and  then  to  the  squire  who  owns  it,  and,  that 
done,  what  has  he  to  do  with  parsons  ?  God  Almighty 
knows  that  he  has  done,  and  none  better,  what  he  ought 
to  do.  He  belongs  to  the  ancient  nobility  of  the  plough 
and  the  spade,  and  he  sickens  to  think  of  that  base-born 
plutocrat,  machinery,  putting  his  nose  into  the  blessed 
fields.  What  has  been,  ought  to  be  for  ever,  and  what 
has  been  is  as  old  as  the  world.  Men  ought  to  cling  to 
the  ancient  courses.  Every  night  for  forty  year  he  's 
had  his  ale,  and  he  will  have  it  now,  though  he  die. 
This  is  a  primaeval  creature,  and  he  is  drawn,  as  a 
giant,  who  happened  to  be  a  poet,  might  have  drawn 
him  before  the  Flood.  It  is  a  mighty  piece  of  work. 
I  pass  over  the  others,  and  take  the  Rizpah.     This 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  445 

brings  us  into  noble  tragedy — noble,  not  by  its  story 
which  is  not  of  heroes,  but  noble  by  two  things  :  by  its 
dreadful  pathos  and  by  its  infinite  motherhood. 

Flesh  of  my  flesh  was  gone,  but  bone  of  my  bone  was  left — 
I  stole  them  all  from  the   lawyers — and  you, — will  you  call  it 

a  theft  ?— 
My  baby,  the  bones  that  had  suck'd   me,  the  bones  that  had 

laughed  and  cried — 
Theirs  ?     O  no  !    They  are  mine — not  theirs — they  had  moved 

in  my  side. 

This  is  a  cry  out  of  the  heart  of  all  the  mothers  of  the 
world  of  man  from  the  beginning,  nay,  the  cry  of  all  the 
mother-beasts  and  birds  before  man  was  known  on 
earth.  All  the  tragedy  of  motherhood  which  has  loved 
and  lost  is  pressed  into  that  verse,  maddens  and  wails 
and  loves  through  the  whole  poem.  To  find  anything 
like  the  dark  horror  and  untamable  woe  of  Rizpah,  we 
must  go  back  to  the  wild  Elizabethan  dramatists,  and  to 
one  higher  than  they.  When  I  read  the  lines  of  Tenny- 
son which  bring  together  the  passion  of  bereaved 
motherhood  and  the  thin  wailing  of  her  boy's  voice  on 
the  wind,  the  raging  of  the  storm  and  the  naked  gibbet 
shrieking  in  the  night,  I  think  of  Lear  in  the  storm, 
when  the  coming  madness  of  the  old  king,  and  the  imi- 
tative madness  of  Edgar,  and  the  elemental  folly  of  the 
fool  raised  into  a  wildness  of  nature  by  the  madness  of 
the  rest,  are  all  matched  and  heightened  by  the  roaring 
and  flashing  of  the  tempest  over  the  barren  moor. 

Wailing,  wailing,  wailing,  the  wind  overland  and  sea — 

And  Willy's  voice  in   the  wind,  "  O  mother,  come  out  to  me," 


44^  Tennyson 

Why  should  he  call  me  to-night,  when  he  knows  that  I  cannot 

go? 
For  the  downs  are  as  bright  as  day,  and  the  full  moon  stares  at 

the  snow. 

We  should  be  seen,  my  dear  ;    they  would  spy  us  out  of  the 

town. 
The  loud  black  nights  for  us,  and  the  storm  rushing  over  the 

down, 
WTien  I  cannot  see  my  own  hand,  but  am  led  by  the  creak  of 

the  chain, 
And  grovel  and  grope  for  my  son  till  I  find  myself  drenched 

with  the  rain. 

This  is  the  tragedy  of  Nature  wedded  to  the  tragedy 
of  a  mother.  Her  only  son  is  hanged  in  chains  and 
eaten  by  the  ravens.  The  horror  and  the  shame,  like 
ravens,  eat  her  heart.     Hung  on  the  coast,  so  high 

That  all  the  ships  of  the  world  could  stare  at  him,  passing  by. 

And  the  dreadful  shame,  struck  into  that  splendid  line, 
and  her  unspeakable  misery  of  love  drove  her  to  mad- 
ness. But  when  she  was  let  out  from  her  cell  "  stupid 
and  still,"  her  mother's  love  was  always  sane  ;  and  as 
the  bones  fell,  she  "  gathered  her  baby  together  "  : 

Do  you  think  I  was  scared  by  the  bones?    I  kiss'd  'em,  I  buried 

'em  all — 
I  can't  dig  deep,  I  am    old — in  the  night  by   the    church-yard 

wall. 
My  Willy  '11  rise  up  whole  when  the  trumpet  of  judgment  'ill 

sound. 
But  I  charge  you  never  to  say  that  I  laid  him  in  holy  ground. 

And  now  she  is  come  to  die,  and  the  "  Lord  who  has 
been  with  her  in  the  dark  "  will  make  her  happy  with 


The  Dramatic  Monologues  447 

her  son — and  a  vast  cry,  the  cry  of  her  son's  love,  comes 
to  her,  shaking  the  walls,  out  of  eternity  : 

But   I   cannot  hear   what  you   say  for   my  Willy's  voice  in  the 

wind — 
The  snow  and  the  sky  so  bright — he  used  but  to  call   in    the 

dark, 
And  he  calls  to  me  now  from  the  church  and  not  from  the  gibbet 

— for  hark  ! 
Nay — you    can    hear   it    yourself — it    is    coming — shaking  the 

walls — 
Willy — the  moon  's  in  a  cloud Good-night.     I  am  going. 

He  calls. 

It  was  btit  a  common  hanging  ;  a  common  thief,  and 
an  old  wife  mad  with  grief,  an  every-day  thing  !  But  a 
great  poet  came  by,  and  we  have  this — the  depths  of 
sorrow,  the  depths  of  love,  infinite  pity,  infinite  mother- 
hood, a  world  on  a  world. 


CHAPTER  XIV 

SPECULATIVE   THEOLOGY 

THE  later  poems  of  Tennyson  are  full  of  speculative 
theology,  and  of  an  interesting  kind  ;  that  kind 
Avhich  not  only  reveals  character,  but  also  opens  out 
those  more  uncommon  regions  of  the  mind  where  life  and 
character  combining  have  produced  strange  gardens  of 
thought.  The  poet  does  not  move  here  in  the  moral 
world,  or  as  the  emotional  imager  of  life,  or  as  the  builder 
of  tales  by  the  harp  of  imagination  ;  but  in  the  world 
beyond  the  senses,  where  things  are  felt  and  thought,  not 
seen  and  proved  ;  in  the  great  deeps  of  passionate  con- 
jecture. And  what  he  thinks  there,  and  how  he  feels  in 
that  spaceless  and  timeless  country,  unveil  to  us  some  of 
the  secret  places  of  his  character. 

I  have  used  the  word  "  passionate"  above,  because, 
unless  such  speculations  are  warmed  by  fire  from  the 
heart,  they  are  not  fit  subjects  for  poetry.  Tennyson's 
speculative  subjects — such  as,  Where  was  the  soul  before 
its  birth  ? — take  their  rise  always  from  the  cries  of  love 

within  him  for  satisfaction,  and,  since  they  come  from 

448 


Speculative  Theology  449 

that  source,  their  treatment  by  him  is  always  poetical.  I 
have  also  used  the  word  "  conjecture  "  above,  in  order 
to  distinguish  these  subjects  from  others  which  he  did 
not  regard  as  matters  of  speculation,  but  of  faith.  Ten- 
nyson believed  in  God  and  that  God  cared  for  men  ;  and 
he  naturally  wrote  wdth  glowing  warmth  about  One  in 
whom  he  thus  believed.  I  might  quote  many  passages  to 
prove  this,  but  I  quote  only  one.  It  is  his  great  hymn, 
a  solemn  anthem  rather,  into  which  he  drew  all  the 
thoughts  and  their  attendant  emotions  which  during  his 
life  and  in  his  poems  he  had  conceived,  felt,  and  ex- 
pressed concerning  the  Father  of  men  : 

I. 

Hallowed  be  Thy  name — Halleluiah  ! 

Infinite  Ideality  !  ' 

Immeasurable  Reality  ! 

Infinite  Personality  ! 
Hallowed  be  Thy  name — Halleluiah  ! 

II. 

We  feel  we  are  nothing — for  all  is  Thou  and  in  Thee  ; 
We  feel  we  are  something — that  also  has  come  from  Thee  ; 
We  feel  we  are  nothing — but  Thou  wilt  help  us  to  be. 
Hallowed  be  Thy  name — Halleluiah  ! 

This,  then,  is  not  matter  of  speculation  to  Tennyson  ; 
l:)ut,  in  what  special  ways,  independent  of  an  outward 
revelation,  this  mighty  Spirit  communicated  Himself  to 
the  individual  soul  ;  and  how  He  was  connected  with 
the  universe  of  Nature — these  were  matters  of  conjec- 
ture, and  the  poet  made  many  speculations  concerning 
29 


450  Tennyson 

tlit-m.  Then  again,  immortality  (that  is  the  continuous 
consciousness  of  one's  own  personality  after  death)  was  a 
matter  of  faith  to  Tennyson!  It  was  fully  set  forth  in 
In  MemoricDH.  It  became  troubled  after  that  poem,  as  I 
have  said  ;  but  his  faith  in  it  fought  like  a  hero  against 
armies  of  doubt.  It  finally  settled  down  into  absolute  con- 
viction. But,  in  what  way  we  were  immortal  ;  whether 
we  were  instantly  alive  and  active  after  dissolution  or 
slept  for  a  time  ;  whether  we  were  still  in  connection 
with  those  we  loved  on  earth  ;  whether  we  moved  onward 
in  that  new  world  as  slowly  as  on  earth  ;  what  our  rela- 
tion to  the  universe  was  after  death  ;  whether  we  re- 
turned in  a  new  life  to  earth,  losing  memory  but  retaining 
our  essential  personality  ;  whether  we  existed  before  we 
were  born  into  this  world,  and  if  so,  of  what  kind  was 
that  existence  ; — these  and  many  others  were  matters  of 
speculation. 

The  first  of  these  is  his  conjecture  with  regard  to  the 
origin  of  the  soul,  that  is,  according  to  him,  that  essential 
part  of  infinite  Being  which,  joined  to  the  infant,  be- 
comes personal  on  earth.  He  assumes  its  existence  ; 
and  he  held,  as  a  speculation,  that  it  was  in  God  before 
it  took  form  on  earth.  Whether  he  adopted  the  further 
view  that  it  was  conscious  then  of  a  separate  life,  I  can- 
not make  out  with  any  clearness  from  his  poems.  Some- 
times it  seems  as  if  he  did  think  this,  but  chiefly  not. 
The  soul  was  a  part  of  God's  life,  but  in  that  general  life 
it  had  no  self-consciousness.  When  a  man  was  to  be 
born,  a  part,  a    spark  of  the   divine   essence,   was  taken 


speculative  Theology  451 

forth,  as  it  were,  out  of  the  vast  Deep  of  Spirit,  and  for 
the  time  of  life  on  earth  Avas  enfolded  in  that  which  we 
call  matter,  with  all  its  relative  limitations,  in  order  that 
this  piece  of  immortal  essence,  the  soul,  might  develop 
and  realise  a  separate  personality,  understanding  that  he 
was  himself,  and  always  to  be  himself  : 

Eternal  form  shall  still  divide 
The  eternal  soul  from  all  beside. 

The  new  being  learnt  slowly  the  Me  and  the  Not-me, 
jearnt  his  personal  apartness.  The  baby  does  not  think 
that  this  is  I : 

But  as  he  grows  he  gathers  much, 

And  learns  the  use  of  "  I  "  and  "  Me"; 
And  finds,  "  I  am  not  what  I  see. 

And  other  than  the  things  I  touch." 

So  rounds  he  to  a  separate  mind 

From  whence  clear  memory  may  begin, 
As  thro'  the  frame  that  binds  him  in 

His  isolation  grows  defined. 

The  "  use  of  blood  and  breath"  is  to  outline  person- 
ality. When  the  man  dies,  he  has  secured  for  ever  a 
distinct  being.  The  other  faith — That  we  shall  remerge 
ourselves  in  the  general  soul,  is  faith,  he  says,  as  vague 
as  it  is  unsweet.  The  soul  comes,  then,  out  of  the  vast 
Deep  of  God  and  returns   to   it   again.*     It   comes  im- 

*  In  The  T'mo  Voices,  a  poem  of  1833,  this  speculation  of  pre- 
existence  has  already  occupied  his  mind.  The  dark  vague  voice 
suggests  that  beginning  implies  ending.  How  do  I  know,  the  other 
voice  within  answers,  that  the  first  time  I  was,  I  was  human,  or  that 


452  Tennyson 

personal ;  it  returns  to  it  a  personality.  This  is  his  view. 
It  is  a  common  view,  but  in  a  great  poet's  hands  it  is 
expressed  so  imaginatively  that  it  ceases  to  be  common. 
In  the  epilogue  to  ///  Memoriam,  when  he  is  thinking 
about  the  child  who  will  be  born  of  the  marriage  he 
then  celebrates  in  song,  he  says  : 

A  soul  shall  draw  from  out  the  vast, 

And  strike  his  being  into  bounds. 

In  the  Idylls  of  the  King^  Arthur  is  born,  according 
to  the  body,  of  Uther  and  Ygerne,  but  the  coming  of  the 
soul  into  him  (and  this  is  made  more  forcible  by  the 
allegory  which  makes  Arthur  symbolise  the  rational  soul) 
is  mystically  represented  by  the  babe  who  descends  from 
heaven  with  the  divine  ship  into  the  sea,  and  is  washed 
to  Merlin's  feet  by  the  wave.  The  two  wizards,  stand- 
ing in  Tintagil  Cove, 

Beheld,  so  high  upon  the  dreary  deeps 

It  seem'd  in  heaven,  a  ship,  the  shape  thereof 

A  dragon  wing'd,  and  all  from  stem  to  stern 

my  life  now  is  in  truth  my  beginning?  Life  cycles  round,  and  I 
may  have  been  in  another  world  before  I  came  here,  though  I  remem- 
ber nothing  of  it.  I  may  have  been  in  a  nobler  place,  or  in  lower 
lives,  and  have  forgotten  all  I  was.  Or  I  may  have  floated  free  as 
naked  essence  (and  to  this  theory  Tennyson  finally  clung),  and  then 
of  course  I  should  remember  nothing  of  it.  Whatever  I  may  have 
been,  there  is  something 

That  touches  me  with  mystic  gleams. 
Like  glimpses  of  forgotten  dreams — 
Of  something  felt,  like  something  here  ; 
Of  something  done,  I  know  not  where  ; 
Such  as  no  language  may  declare. 


Speculative  Theology  453 

Bright  with  a  shining  people  on  the  decks, 
And  gone  as  soon  as  seen. 

A  noble  piece  of  symbolism  !  When  Merlin  afterwards 
is  asked  about 

The  shining  dragon  and  the  naked  child, 
Descending  in  the  glory  of  the  seas, 

he  answers,  laughing,  in  riddling  triplets,  the  last  lines  of 
which  are  these — lines  quoted  again  and  again  at  every 
crisis  of  Arthur's  life,  and  at  his  death  : 

Sun,  rain,  and  sun  !     and  ivhere  is  he  that  knows? 
Frotn  ike  great  deep  to  the  great  deep  he  goes. 

We  know  what  Tennyson  in  this  passage  meant  by  the 
Great  Deep  from  his  poem  De  Frofundis,  written  on 
the  birth  of  his  eldest  son,  and  far  the  finest  of  his 
speculative  poems.  Its  stately  and  mystic  sublimity  is 
warmed  by  the  profound  emotion  of  his  fatherhood. 
It  is  divided  into  two  parts — two  greetings.  Here  is 
the  beginning  of  it — and  since  Milton  no  more  dignified 
lines  have  been  written  : 

Out  of  the  deep,  my  child,  out  of  the  deep, 

Where  all  that  was  to  be,  in  all  that  was, 

Whirl'd  for  a  million  seons  thro'  the  vast 

Waste  dawn  of  multitudinous-eddying  light — 

Out  of  the  deep,  my  child,  out  of  the  deep. 

Thro'  all  this  changing  world  of  changeless  law, 

And  every  phase  of  ever-heightening  life. 

And  nine  long  months  of  antenatal  gloom. 

With  this  last  moon,  this  crescent — her  dark  orb 

Touch'd  with  earth's  light — thou  comest,  darling   boy: 

and  then  he  prophesies  the  boy's  life  and  the   man's,  till 


454  Tennyson 

he  join  the  great  deep  again.  The  second  greeting 
speaks  first  of  the  great  deep  itself. 

Out  of  the  deep,  my  child,  out  of  the  deep, 
From  that  great  deep,  before  our  world  begins. 
Whereon  the  Spirit  of  God  moves  as  He  will — 
Out  of  the  deep,  my  child,  out  of  the  deep, 
From  that  true  world  within  the  world  we  see,* 
Whereof  our  world  is  but  the  bounding  shore — 
Out  of  the  deep,  Spirit,  out  of  the  deep, 
With  this  ninth  moon,  that  sends  the  hidden  sun 
Down  yon  dark  sea,  thou  comest,  darling  boy. 

And  the  Spirit  is  half-lost  in  its  body  which  is  its  shadow, 
and  yet  is  the  sign  and  the  cause  of  its  becoming  per- 
sonal. It  wails  on  entering  the  world,  for  it  is  banished  ; 
it  knows  mystery  and  doubt  and  ])ain  and  time  and 
space,  in  its  progress  to  self-consciousness.  Yet  that 
it  might  become  a  person  was  the  intention  of  the  In- 
finite One  who  sent  it  out  of  Himself — 

Who  made  thee  unconceivably  Thyself 
Out  of  His  whole  World-self  and  all  in  all. 

And   the  chief  miracle   is  this,  that  the  child  grows 
into  a  separate  will  and  character,  knowing  himself  to 

*  Of   this  great  deep  of  Spirit,  knowledge  but   stirs  the  surface- 
shadow.     It  does  not  pierce  into  its  depths  : 

The  Abysm  of  all  Abysms,  beneath,   within 
The  blue  of  sky  and  sea,  the  green  of  earth, 
And  in  the  million-millionth  of  a  grain 
Which  cleft  and  cleft  again  for  evermore, 
And  ever  vanishing,  never  vanishes. 
To  me,  my  son,  more  mystic  than  myself, 
Or  even  than  the  Nameless  is  to  me. 

The  Ancient  Sa^e. 


Speculative  Theology  455 

be  himself,  and  known  by  others  to  be  himself — for  ever 
different  from  all  other  souls — 

With  power  on  thine  own  act  and  on  the  world. 

This  is  the  main  speculation.  Within  it  arose  two 
other  questions  which  have  always  pervaded  inquiry 
concerning  the  origin  of  the  soul.  The  first  is — Does- 
the  soul  live  over  and  over  again  in  other  forms  on  this 
earth,  and,  not  carrying  with  it  full  memory  of  the  past 
lives,  yet  carry  with  it  the  progress  it  has  gained,  or  the 
retrogression  it  has  made  ?  There  are  two  lines  in  this 
De  Profundis  which  seem  to  suggest  that  this  was  a 
thought  of  Tennyson's  : 

and  still  depart 
From  death  to  death  thro'  life  and  life,  and  find 
Nearer  and  ever  nearer  Him. 

And  it  was  certainly  his  view  that  the  spirit  moved 
onwards  hereafter  : 

From  state  to  state  the  spirit  walks. 

But  this  does  not  say  that  the  spirit  returns  to  earth  in 
another  form.  On  the  contrary,  many  passages  appear 
to  assert  that  personality,  established  here,  moves  on- 
ward, self-conscious,  and  with  full  memory,  in  the 
world  to  come,  returning  no  more  to  earth.  Tennyson 
did  not,  then,  hold  the  Oriental  or  the  Platonic  view, 
which  has  been  modified  by  a  thousand  speculators 
into  a  thousand  forms. 

The   second   question   is — Has   the  soul,  while   shad- 


456  Tennyson 

owed  and  limited  by  sense,  vague  remembrances,  as 
Plato  or  Wordsworth  thought,  of  the  diviner  land 
whence  it  came,  touches  of  what  it  was  of  old  in  God 
— at  which  touches  the  sensible  world  fades  away,  and 
man,  suddenly  swept  into  the  supersensuous  life,  knows 
again  his  being  in  the  Being  of  the  infinite  Spirit  ?  The 
quotation  already  given  from  The  Two  Voices  proves 
that  Tennyson  did  suggest  this  in  his  youth,  but  in  the 
later  poems  it  was  plainly  stated.  As  age  grew  upon 
him,  this  speculation  became  more  dear  ;  and  the  pas- 
sage in  The  Ancient  Sage  which  best  enshrines  it  is  full 
of  a  personal  interest.  It  records  Tennyson's  youthful 
experience,  and  looking  back  on  this  from  his  old  age, 
he  explains  what  he  believes  the  experience  meant. 

The  young  man  who  is  with  the  ancient  Sage  repre- 
sents unbelief  in  any  life  beyond  the  material,  and  his 
song  cries  out  concerning  man  : 

O  worms  and  maggots  of  to-day 

Without  their  hope  of  wings  ! 
Tho'  some  have  gleams  or  so  they  say 

Of  more  than  mortal  things. 

And  the  Sage  answers,  "  To-day  ?  "  Worms  of  the 
present  perhaps,  for  indeed  a  man  may  make  himself 
a  very  maggot, — "  but  what  of  yesterday  ?  "  Has  a 
man  no  remembrance,  no  vague  suggestion  of  a  past  in 
which  he  had  life  before  he  was  on  earth  ?  And  here 
we  have  Tennyson's  own  experience  : 

For  oft 
On  me,  when  boy,  there  came  what  then  I  call'd, 


Speculative  Theology  45; 

Who  knew  no  books  and  no  philosophies, 

In  my  boy-phrase,  "  The  Passion  of  the  Past." 

The  first  gray  streak  of  earliest  summer  dawn. 

The  last  long  stripe  of  waning  crimson  gloom, 

As  if  the  late  and  early  were  but  one — 

A  height,  a  broken  grange,  a  grove,  a  flower 

Had  murmurs,  "  Lost  and  gone  and  lost  and  gone  !" 

A  breath,  a  whisper — some  divine  farewell — 

Desolate  sweetness — far  and  far  away — 

What  had  he  loved,  what  had  he  lost,  the  boy  ? 

I  know  not,  and  I  speak  of  what  has  been. 

This  common   feeling,  this  mystic  suggestion  of  the 
dreaming  soul,  has  never  been  more  beautifully  given. 

Some  divine  farewell, 
Desolate  sweetness,  far  and  far  away, 

is  perfect  in  truth  and  pathos.  The  same  thought  is 
put,  almost  as  beautifully,  in  a  song  published  four 
years  after  The  Ancient  Sage,  and  the  motive  of  it  is 
taken  from  the  lingering  sweetness  of  the  words — "  far 
and  far  away  " — upon  his  ear.  Here  also  Tennyson 
recalls  the  boy's  celestial  dreams  of  a  land  known  in 
the  dawn  of  life.  I  should  like  to  quote  it  all,  but  I 
select  only  the  three  verses  which  bear  on  the  question  : 

What  vague  world-whisper,  mystic  pain  or  joy. 
Thro'  those  three  words  would  haunt  him  when  a  boy. 

Far — far — away  ? 

A  whisper  from  his  dawn  of  life  ?  a  breath 
From  some  fair  dawn  beyond  the  doors  of  death 

Far — far — away. 

Far,  far,  how  far  ?  from  o'er  the  gates  of  Birth, 
The  faint  horizons,  all  the  bounds  of  earth. 

Far — far — away  ? 


458  Tennyson 

This,  felt  as  a  boy,  brings  about,  in  such  a  tempera- 
ment, and  when  it  recurs  in  a  different  way  in  manhood, 
the  apparent  dissolution  of  all  the  world  of  sense,  un- 
consciousness of  the  body  and  existence  apart  from  it. 
We  have  heard  of  this  already  in  the  Sir  Galahad. 
Transports  mightier  than  love  lift  him  above  the  world 
of  sense.  His  spirit  beats  her  mortal  bars.  His  very 
body  ceases  to  be  matter  : 

And,  stricken  by  an  angel's  hand, 

This  mortal  armour  that  I  wear, 
This  weight  and  size,  this  heart  and  eyes, 

Are  touch'd,  are  turn'd  to  finest  air. 

The  weird  seizures  of  the  Prince  in  The  Princess,  in 
which  he  knew  not  the  shadow  from  the  substance  ;  the 
visions  of  Arthur,  in  which  the  earth  seems  not  earth, 
the  light  and  air  not  light  and  air,  his  very  hand  and 
foot  a  dream,  lead  us  up  to  Tennyson's  full  and  personal 
expression  of  this  experience  in  The  Ancient  Sage  : 

And  more,  my  son  !    for  more  than  once  when  I 

Sat  all  alone,  revolving  in  myself 

The  word  that  is  the  symbol  of  myself, 

The  mortal  limit  of  the  Self  was  loosed. 

And  past  into  the  Nameless,  as  a  cloud 

Melts  into  heaven.     I  touch'd  my  limbs,  the  limbs 

Were  strange  not  mine — and  yet  no  shade  of  doubt, 

But  utter  clearness,  and  thro'  loss  of  Self 

The  gain  of  such  large  life  as  match'd  with  ours 

Were  Sun  to  spark — unshadowable  in  words. 

Themselves  but  shadows  of  a  shadow-world. 

It  is  the  vision,  vouchsafed  to  earth,  of  what  the  soul 


Speculative  Theology  459 

will  be  when  it  returns  out  of  the  shadow  of  sense  into 
the  substance  whence  it  came  : 

If  what  we  call 
The  Spirit  flash  not  all  at  once  from  out 
This  shadow  into  substance. 

"  This  world,"  said  Novalis,  "  is  not  a  dream,  but  it 
ought  to  become  one,  and  perhaps  it  will."  And  the 
misery,  hardness,  and  folly  of  earth  are,  Tennyson  thinks, 
in  the  dream,  and  not  in  the  reality.  We  misshape 
through  the  senses  the  actual  world.  '*  My  God,"  he 
cries  in  The  Sisters,  speaking  in  the  mouth  of  their 
father,  "  I  would  not  live. 

Save  that  I  think  this  gross  hard-seeming  world 

Is  our  misshaping  vision  of  the  Powers 

Behind  the  world,  that  make  our  griefs  our  gains." 

Death  then  is  the  flashing  of  the  soul,  out  of  a  life  in 
which  all  reality  is  distorted,  into  the  luminous  straight 
life  out  of  which  it  came  ;  the  passing  from  illusion  into 
reality. 

Yet  another  speculation  is  connected  with  this  theory 
of  the  soul,  and  concerns  its  power  of  acting  indepen- 
dently of  the  body.  This  speculation  asks  three  ques- 
tions. First,  can  the  soul  of  one  living  in  the  other 
world  speak  to  the  soul  of  one  living  on  earth,  not  by 
voice,  but  by  intensity  of  thought,  driven  by  intensity 
of  feeling,  smiting  through  space  on  the  thought  and 
feeling  of  a  soul  on  earth  ?  Secondly,  can  those  on 
earth  communicate  in  this  way  with  those  that  have 
passed  away  ?     Thirdly,  can  two  persons  both  on  earth 


460  Tennyson 

touch  one  another  in  this  fashion — one  soul  vibrating,  as 
if  through  the  ether,  its  message  to  another  soul — across 
any  distance  whatever  ?  To  all  these  three  questions 
Tennyson  answers  yes.  In  Memoriain  is  full  of  passages 
which  either  maintain  or  suggest  the  two  first.  "  The 
dead  shall  look  me  through  and  through,"  he  cries. 
"  If  the  grave  divide  us  not,  be  with  me  now  !  " 

And  he,  the  Spirit  himself,  may  come 
When  all  the  nerve  of  sense  "s  dumb 
Spirit  to  Spirit,  Ghost  to  Ghost. 

The  soul  of  his  friend  in  heaven  ai^swers  his  cry  for 
love, 

I  watch  thee  from  the  quiet  shore  ; 
Thy  spirit  up  to  mine  may  reach  ; 
But  in  dear  words  of  human  speech 
We  two  communicate  no  more. 

And  most  of  all  this  is  laid  down  in  that  full-versed 
passage,  when,  rapt  by  reading  the  letters  of  his  friend 
from  all  the  world  of  sense,  the  two  souls  meet,  and  he 
is  swept  into  the  infinite  world  : 

Till  all  at  once  it  seem'd  at  last 
The  living  soul  was  flash'd  on  mine,* 

*  This  is  a  casual  experience  on  earth,  but  it  will  be  the  normal 
experience  of  souls  in  the  world  to  come.  There  is  a  verse  in  the 
poem  entitled,  Happy,  which  expresses  this  : 

This  wall  of  solid  flesh  that  comes  between  your  soul  and  mine 
Will  vanish  and  give  place  to  the  beauty  that  endures, 

The  beauty  that  endures  on  the  Spiritual  height, 

When  we  shall  stand  transfigured,  like  Christ  on  Hermon  hill 

And  moving  each  to  music,  soul  in  soul  and  light  in  light, 
Shall  flash  thro'  one  another  in  a  moment  as  we  will. 


speculative  Theology  461 

And  mine  in  this  was  wound,  and  whirl'd 
About  empyreal  heights  of  thought 
And  came  on  that  which  is,  and  caught 

The  deep  pulsations  of  the  world. 

Many  other  instances  occur  in  the  poems.  The 
mother  in  Rizpah  hears  her  son's  voice  on  the  wind, 
calling  to  her.  In  the  hour  of  her  death  he  calls  so 
loud  that  she  dies  in  bliss  after  her  awful  sorrow.  In 
The  Ring,  the  dead  mother  makes  her  child  conscious 
of  her  presence  ;  the  child  sees  her  face  ;  and  the  hus- 
band feels  his  dead  wife  impress  her  will  upon  him — 

The  Ghost  in  Man,  the  Ghost  that  once  was  Man, 
But  cannot  wholly  free  itself  from  Man, 
Are  calling  to  each  other  thro'  a  dawn 
Stranger  than  earth  has  ever  seen  ;  the  veil 
Is  rending,  and  the  Voices  of  the  day 
Are  heard  across  the  Voices  of  the  dark. 

In  The  Sisters,  the  mystic  bond  which  unites  them  is 
not  dissolved  by  death.  The  love  and  sorrow  of  the 
dead  overwhelm  the  life  of  the  living  sister ;  and  the 
man  who  loved  them  both  feels  them,  from  the  far 
world,  moving  always  with  him.  It  is  the  one  lovely 
passage  of  a  poem  which  is  not  a  great  success. 

Now  in  this  quiet  of  declining  life 
Thro'  dreams  by  night  and  trances  of  the  day. 
The  sisters  glide  about  me  hand  in  hand, 
Both  beautiful  alike,  nor  can  I  tell 
One  from  the  other,  no,  nor  care  to  tell 
One  from  the  other,  only  know  they  come, 
They  smile  upon  me,  till,  remembering  all 
The  love  they  both  have  borne  me,  and  the  love 


462  Tennyson 

I  bore  them  both — divided  as  I  am 
From  either  by  the  stillness  of  the  grave — 
I  know  not  which  of  these  I  love  the  most. 

The  third  question  asks  whether  two  souls  while  still 
on  earth  may  not,  in  high-wrought  states  of  intense 
feeling,  also  touch  each  other,  sometimes  clearly,  some- 
times obscurely.  Tennyson  thought  it  possible.  In 
Enoch  Arden,  when  Philip  asks  Annie  to  marry  him,  she 
answers  that  it  is  borne  in  on  her  that  Enoch  lives. 
When  she  was  wed,  a  footstep  seemed  to  fall  on  her 
path,  whispers  on  her  ear  ;  she  could  not  bear  to  be 
alone,  she  thought  when  she  lifted  the  latch  to  enter  her 
house,  she  might  see  Enoch  by  the  fire — and  these  mys- 
terious instincts  only  passed  away  when  she  had  a  child 
by  Philip.  They  were  the  passionate  thoughts  of  Enoch 
from  his  far-off  isle  striking  on  her  heart.  And  on  the 
day  of  her  marriage,  Enoch  himself  heard 

Though  faintly,  merrily,  far  and  far  away, 

the  pealing  of  his  parish  bells,  and  started  up,  shudder- 
ing, for  then  the  tragedy  of  his  life  was  wrought.  In 
fuller  statement,  Aylmers  Field  records  this  belief  of 
Tennyson's.  When  Edith  dies,  calling  on  her  lover's 
name,  he  hears  the  cry  in  London  and  knows  that  she  is 
gone : 

Star  to  star  vibrates  light  ;  may  soul  to  soul 
Strike  thro'  a  finer  element  of  her  own  ? 

So  speaks  the  poet,  marking  the  very  question  which  the 
scientific  men  in  the  Psychical  Society  ask  themselves. 


speculative  Theology  463 

Are  these  touches  done  through  the  finer  forms  of  matter, 
or  is  that  matter  spirit  ? 

These  were  some  of  Tennyson's  speculations  con- 
cerning the  soul.  But  they  all  assumed  the  existence 
of  a  great  Spirit,  and  of  our  souls  as  a  part  of  him. 
As  Tennyson  grew  old,  these  assumptions  were  more 
:.nd  more  challenged  from  the  side  of  philosophy  and 
sci  nee,  and  the  world  in  which  he  lived  grew  more 
and  mure  careless  of  belief  in  them.  One  result  of 
this  was  an  assertion  of  materialism  in  which  God  and 
the  soul  were  alike  denied.  He  met  the  materialism  in  a 
Drama,  The  Promise  of  May ^  for  which  I  have  no  admira- 
tion. It  seems  to  make  the  altogether  false  assumption 
that  materialism  necessarily  ends  in  immorality. 

He  is  more  interesting,  and  says  nearly  all  he  wants 
to  say,  in  the  poem  of  The  Ancient  Sage — a  later  Two 
Voices — which  contains  a  great  number  of  speculative 
answers  to  the  assertions  of  materialism.  Their  specu- 
lative character  induces  me  to  call  attention  to  a  few 
of  them  in  this  chapter. 

The  young  man  who  walks  with  the  Sage  declares 
that  fhere  is  nothing  but  v.hat  the  senses  tell  us.  God 
has  never  been  seen. 

"  In  yourself,"  the  Sage  replies,  "  the  Nameless  speaks, 
and  you  see  Him  when  you  send  your  soul  through  the 
boundless  heaven."  This  is  Kant's  famous  phrase  put 
into  verse.  **  If  the  Spirit,"  he  adds,  "  should  withdraw 
from  all  you  see,  and  hear,  the  whole  world  of  sense 
would  vanish." 


464  Tennyson 

"  Since  God  never  came  among  us,  He  cannot  be 
proved." 

"  No,"  answers  the  Sage,  "  nothing  can  be  proved. 
You  cannot  prove  the  existence  of  the  world,  or  of  the 
body  or  the  soul,  or  of  yourself,  or  of  me  that  speak 
with  you — nor  can  you  disprove  these  things.  There- 
fore, since  you  can  neither  affirm  nor  deny  by  reason, 
cleave  to  the  sunnier  side  of  faith  in  a  Power  who  makes 
the  summer  out  of  the  winter  !  " 

**  What  Power  ?  The  real  power  is  Time,  that  brings 
all  things  to  decay." 

"  There  is  no  such  thing  as  Time.  It  is  relative,  not 
absolute.  You  cannot  argue  from  its  effects.  They 
exist  to  us,  but  not  to  God  ;  and  the  earth-life  and  its 
perishing  precede  the  true  life  ;  their  darkness  is  in  us, 
not  in  reality.  It  is  like  the  yolk  in  the  egg  which 
breaks  out  into  a  new  being." 

"  Ah  ;  "  sings  the  young  man,  "  we  are  each  but  as 
one  ripple  in  a  boundless  deep.  Live,  then,  only  to 
enjoy,  and  lorget  the  darkness  to  which  we  hasten." 

"  Yes,  but  the  ripple  feels  the  boundlessness  of  the 
deep,  and  feels  itself  as  at  one  with  its  boundless  motion. 
It  knows  itself  alive,  and  knows  that  there  is  a  chance, 
even  in  the  judgment  of  the  understanding,  that  utter 
darkness  does  not  close  the  day.  The  clouds  you  see 
are  themselves  children  of  the  sun.  The  light  and 
shadow  that  you  say  rule  below  are  mere  names.  Both 
are  only  relative.  The  Absolute  is  beyond  them  both. 
And,   at   least,  the   conclusion  to  be   drawn    from  our 


speculative  Theology  465 

gloom  is  different  from  yours — '  Eat  and  drink,  for  to- 
morrow we  die.'  Day  and  night  are  only  counter-terms 
like  border  races  always  at  war.  You  may  talk  for  ever 
in  battle  about  them.  One  thing,  at  the  end  of  all 
speculation,  is  plain.  There  is  night  enough  in  your 
city  which  you  can  make  into  light.  Do  it,  and  then, 
before  you  die,  you  may  see 

The  high-heaven  dawn  of  more  than  mortal  day 
Strike  on  the  Mount  of  Vision." 

Thus  the  Sage  ends  his  speculations,  and  we  see,  in 
this  last  advice,  the  practical  moralist  emerging  from 
the  metaphysical  poet  who  thinks  that  Time  and  Space 
do  not  really  exist  ;  that  our  life  here  is  illusion  in  com- 
parison with  the  true  life  which  underlies  the  illusive  ; 
and  that  the  world  of  matter  in  which  we  move  is  only 
what  we,  in  a  distorted  fashion,  perceive  of  Spirit. 

The  poem  is  interesting  to  compare  with    The  Two 

Voices.     It   knits  together  the  views  of  his  old  age  and 

of  his  youth,  the  thoughts  of  1842  with  those  of  1885. 

But  we  see  in  its  constant  reference  to  the  night  and 

decay  which  beset  mankind   how  strongly  the  trouble  of 

the  world  and  of  the  individual  man  had  now  affected 

him.     And  he  asked  himself — If  there  be  a  Spirit  of 

whom  we  form  a  part  and  who  loves  us,  if  our  real  self 

is  the  soul,  and  it  comes  from  God  and  goes  to  God ; 

if  it  is  thus  necessarily  immortal — why  are  we  in  such 

trouble  ?     The  speculative  answer  he  gives  arose  out  of 

his   reading  of  Darwin.     It  is— That  our  body  comes 
30 


466  Tennyson 

from  the  brute,  and  carries  the  brute  with  it  ;  that  in 
the  body,  the  soul  met  witli  the  brute,  and  had  to  con- 
quer the  brute.  In  that  admixture,  the  worry  and  the 
battle,  the  confusion  and  torment  of  it  all,  were  con- 
tained. This  battle,  repeated  in  every  individual,  is 
repeated  also  in  the  whole  race.  It  ended  quickly 
enough  for  the  individual,  for  he  was  transferred  to  a 
higher  world,  beyond  the  brutal  elements  ;  but  it  was  to 
reach  an  end  for  the  whole  race  with  as  infinite  a  slow- 
ness as  it  had  been  conducted  in  the  past.  ..^on  after 
aeon  was  to  pass,  before  man,  as  a  whole,  would  reach 
his  perfection.  I  think  that  this  latter  view,  of  which  I 
have  elsewhere  spoken,  was  a  pity  ;  but  how  is  a  poet 
to  avoid  trouble  in  his  art  when  he  allows  himself  to  be 
influenced  by  scientific  theories  ?  He  is  sure  to  disturb 
the  clearness  of  his  fountain.  He  ought  to  keep  out  of 
science  altogether. 

As  to  the  individual,  it  was  different.  Why  did  God 
link  a  piece  of  divine  being  to  a  brutal  matter  ?  What 
could  be  the  use  of  it  ?  In  In  Mcmoria?n,  in  many 
poems  before  and  after  it,  the  problem  is  stated  and 
speculations  are  made  upon  it.  It  was  partly  done,  as 
we  have  already  seen,  that  the  soul  might  realise  its  per- 
sonality, might,  having  lived  in  the  body,  learn  that  it 
had  distinct  being  ;  and  indeed,  so  far  as  we  know, 
there  is  no  other  way  of  learning  it.  But  there  was 
something  more.  This  was  done,  in  order  that  the  soul 
might  conquer  the  brute,  and  having  conquered,  might 
know  that   it    could  live  for  ever  on    a    higher    plane. 


speculative  Theology  467 

When  the  beast  was  worked  out,  then  the  soul  knew  it- 
self to  be  of  God,  and  from  God,  and  belonging  to  God 
for  ever.  This  is  put  most  clearly  in  that  poem  entitled, 
By  an  Evolutionist,  where  we  find  Tennyson,  at  the  age 
of  eighty  years,  telling  us  not  only  what  he  thought,  but 
also  to  what  he  had  attained.  Its  personal  record  is  of 
a  profound  interest.  We  hear  one  of  our  greatest  men, 
in  whom  imagination  burned  to  the  close  of  life,  reveal- 
ing what  he  believed  God  had  done  for  him,  and  had 
given  him  power  to  do. 

If  my  body  come  from  brutes,  tho'  .somewhat  finer  than  their  own, 

I  am  heir,  and  this  my  kingdom.     Shall  the  royal  voice  be  mute  ? 
No.  but  if  the  rebel  subject  seek  to  drag  me  from  the  throne, 

Hold   the   sceptre,    Human    Soul,  and   rule   thy  Province   of  the 
brute. 
1  have  climbed  to  the  snows  of  Age,  and  I  gaze  at  a  field  in  the  Past, 

Where  I  sank  with  the  body  at  times  in  the  sloughs  of  a  low  desire. 
But  I  hear  no  yelp  of  the  beast,  and  the  Man  is  quiet  at  last 

As  he  stands  on  the  heights  of  his  life  with  a  glimpse  of  a  height 
that  is  higher. 

So  it  was  with  the  poet  at  the  close  of  his  long  conten- 
tion ;  and  when  it  comes  to  that,  speculation  is  no  more, 
and  certainty  is  hard  at  hand.  The  certainty  is  ex- 
pressed even  in  this  very  volume  of  1885.  Yet  his 
well-loved  speculation  of  the  Soul  coming  out  of  the 
Deep  and  returning  to  it  again  asked  once  more  for 
recognition,  and  attained  it. 

Sunset  and  evening  star. 

And  one  clear  call  for  me  ! 
And  may  there  be  no  moaning  of  the  bar. 

When  I  put  out  to  sea, 


468 


Tennyson 


But  such  a  tide  as  moving  seems  asleep, 

Too  full  for  sound  and  foam, 
When  that  which  drew  from  out  the  boundless  deep 

Turns  again  home. 


CHAPTER    XV 
THE   NATURE-POETRY 

THE  love  of  Nature,"  the  meaning  of  which  term 
we  understand  without  explanation,  has  reached 
its  greatest  and  most  various  development  in  the 
nineteenth  century.  It  had  always  been  a  part  of  an 
artist's  soul  among  the  Aryan  families  of  the  earth,  but 
in  these  last  hundred  years  Nature  has  risen  almost  into 
an  equality  with  humanity  as  a  subject  of  art.  In  our 
own  country,  Turner,  during  a  long  life,  shaped  into  thou- 
sands of  pictures,  drawings,  and  studies,  the  impressions 
he  received  from  solitary  Nature,  and  with  a  passion 
which,  changing  its  methods  year  by  year,  never  changed 
its  intensity.  And  he  was  only  the  greatest  of  a  host  of 
painters  who  have,  in  solitary  love  of  Nature  for  her 
own  sake,  recorded  her  doings  and  her  feelings  with  an 
intimacy,  affection,  and  joy  which  has  been  as  eager  and 
as  productive  in  France  as  in  England.  The  musicians 
were  not  apart  from  this  movement.  We  know  from 
their  letters  and  books  that  they  composed  a  great  num- 
ber of  pieces   for  the  express  purpose  of  recording  all 

469 


470  Tennyson 

they  felt  in  the  presence  of  Nature,  and  when  alone  with 
her.  The  prose-writers  of  fiction  and  fancy  gave  them- 
selves up  almost  too  much  to  natural  description  ;  and 
many  books  exist  which  are  nothing  more  than  emo- 
tional statements  of  the  profound  love  of  their  writers 
for  Nature  in  her  solitudes.  The  poets  were  not,  of 
course,  behindhand.  England,  France,  Germany,  Italy, 
Spain,  but  chiefly  the  three  first,  were  driven  to  express 
this  love  of  Nature  when  they  were  isolated  with  her  as 
a  bridegroom  with  a  bride. 

Wordsworth  was  the  first  to  lift  this  love  of  Nature 
for  her  own  sake  into  a  worship  ;  and  it  passed  on,  re- 
ceiving no  less  incense,  to  Walter  Scott  and  Byron,  to 
Shelley  and  Keats.  It  exists,  undiminished,  in  Brown- 
ing, in  Swinburne,  and  Morris,  and  in  a  host  of  other 
poets  whose  names  we  need  not  here  recall.  Each  of 
these  had  his  own  special  way  of  feeling  the  beauty  of 
the  natural  world,  and  his  own  manner  of  representing 
it,  but  the  lonely  love  they  all  felt  was  the  steady  ele- 
ment underneath  their  individual  forms  of  expression. 
Tennyson  had  his  own  method,  and  it  was  different 
from  that  of  all  the  others.  It  differed  curiously,  and 
the  results  to  which  we  are  led,  when  we  consider  it, 
are  curious. 

Mainly  speaking,  that  difference  consists  in  the  ab- 
sence from  his  mind  of  any  belief  or  conception  of  a 
life  in  Nature.  He  described  Nature,  on  the  whole,  as 
she  was  to  his  senses,  as  she  appeared  on  the  outside. 
He  did  it  with  extraordinary  skill,  observation,  accuracy, 


The    Nature-Poetry  471 

and  magnificence  ;  and  we  are  full  of  delight  with  this 
work  of  his.  I  have  dwelt  on  it  from  poem  to  poem, 
and  I  hope  I  have  succeeded  in  making  clear  my  full 
admiration  of  its  power,  beauty,  variety,  and  range.  But 
when  we  have  done  all  this,  and  think  less  of  particular 
descriptions,  and  more  of  the  whole  impression  made 
by  his  work  on  Nature,  we  are  surprised  to  find  that  our 
interest  in  Tennyson's  poetry  of  natural  description  is 
more  intellectual  than  emotional.  We  ask  why,  and  the 
answer  is, — He  did  not  conceive  of  Nature  as  alive.  He 
did  not  love  her  as  a  living  Being. 

Again,  when  we  read  his  natural  descriptions,  we  find 
them  drenched  with  humanity.  It  is  impossible,  save 
very  rarely,  to  get  away  in  them  from  the  sorrows,  or 
the  joys  of  man.  But  when  we  do  not  meet  with  hu- 
manity in  his  landscape,  the  landscape  by  itself  is  cold. 
It  rarely  has  any  sentiment  of  its  own.  The  sentiment 
in  it  is  imposed  upon  it  by  the  human  soul  ;  so  that,  at 
last,  we  are  driven  to  say  :  "  On  the  whole,  this  poet 
did  not  care  much  to  be  alone  with  Nature,  and  did 
not  love  her  dearly  for  her  own  sake.  And  this  is 
strange  ;  it  is  unlike  any  other  great  poet  of  this  century." 

These  are  the  two  curious  wants  in  his  poetry  of 
Nature,  and  I  believe  I  can  make  most  clear  how  he 
differed  from  the  other  poets  by  describing  their  position 
towards  Nature  in  contrast  with  his  own. 

I  take  Wordsworth  first.  I  need  not  say  too  much 
about  his  view  of  Nature.  I  have  written  of  it  elsewhere, 
and    many  others   have  also  dwelt  upon  it.     But,  largely 


472  Tennyson 

speaking,  he  believed  within  his  poetic  self  that  Nature 
was  alive  in  every  vein  of  her  ;  thought,  loved,  felt, 
and  enjoyed  in  her  own  way,  not  in  a  way  the  same 
as  we,  but  in  a  similar  way,  so  similar  that  we  could 
communicate  with  her  and  she  with  us,  as  one  spirit  can 
communicate  with  another.  There  is  a  sympathy  be- 
tween us ;  but  there  is  this  difference,  that,  with  few 
exceptions,  she  is  the  giver  and  we  the  receiver.  Then, 
what  is  true  of  the  whole  of  Nature  is  true  of  the  parts. 
Every  flower,  cloud,  bird  and  beast,  every  mountain, 
wood,  and  every  tree,  every  stream,  the  great  sky  and  the 
mighty  being  of  the  ocean,  shared  in  the  life  of  the 
whole,  and  made  it,  in  themselves,  a  particular  life.  Each 
of  them  enjoyed,  felt,  loved,  thought,  in  its  own  fashion 
and  in  a  different  fashion  from  the  rest.  Each  of  them 
could  send  its  own  special  life  to  us  men,  as  well  as  to 
one  another  ;  could  give  us  sympathy  and  receive  our 
gratitude.  This  was  no  mere  dream,  it  was  a  reality 
to  Wordsworth.  It  is  not  the  fancy  of  a  lover  of  his, 
gathered  from  poetic  phrases  in  his  work,  nor  is  it  an 
impossible  philosophy.  No  one  can  say  that  it  may 
not  be  true.  It  cannot  be  proved,  indeed,  but  it 
cannot  be  disproved.  He  lays  it  down  in  clear 
form  at  the  end  of  The  Recluse  as  a  theory  which 
is  at  the  base  of  all  his  poetry  of  Nature  and  Man. 
There  is  a  pre-arranged  harmony,  he  says,  between 
man's  mind  and  the  natural  world  which  fits  them  to 
one  another,  which  enables  them  to  wed  one  another  ; 
and  the  philosophic  ground  of  this  theory  is  that  both 


The   Nature- Poetry  473 

Nature  and  Man,  being  alike  from  God,  and  existing 
together  in  God,  are  capable,  when  separated  from  one 
another  in  this  phenomenal  world,  of  coming  together 
again,  and  finding  themselves  to  be  consciously  in  a 
union,  one  with  another,  of  mutual  joy  and  consolation. 
This  was  the  philosophic  conception  in  the  realm  of 
which  he  always  lived.  Imagination  took  it  up,  and 
clothed  it  with  glory  and  honour,  and  put  into  it  an  eager 
heart  of  life,  so  that  Nature  was  his  dearest  friend,  and 
all  its  motions  in  all  things  his  passionate  delight.  Wher- 
ever he  went,  he  had  perfect  companions,  and  each  of 
them  had  something  new  to  say.  Wherever  he  went,  he 
saw  all  things  in  an  intercommunion,  the  love  of  which, 
being  given  and  received,  made  the  majesty,  beauty,  and 
harmony  of  the  universe  ;  and  the  sight  filled  him  with 
incommunicable  rapture.  And  this  intercommunion  was 
of  life  with  life.  In  one  word,  every  distinct  thing  in 
Nature  had  a  soul  of  its  own.  He  seems  to  have  gone 
even  further.  Every  place — with  all  the  separate  lives 
which  belonged  to  its  flowers,  clouds,  stones,  lakes, 
streams,  and  trees — had,  over  and  above  these  lives,  a 
collective  life  of  its  own.  Hence  such  phrases  as  "  the 
souls  of  lonely  places."  And,  finally,  all  the  souls  of 
these  separate  places  and  of  all  their  separate  objects, 
together  ran  up  into  the  Spirit  of  the  Earth,  and  then 
into  the  One  Spirit  of  the  Universe. 

Shelley  (without  Wordsworth's  quasi-philosophic 
ground  for  his  belief  )  held  at  root  the  same  idea  that 
Wordsworth  held — that  all  the   universe  was  alive,  and 


474  Tennyson 

that  every  part  of  it  had  its  own  particular  life  in  the 
whole.  He  represented  this  vast  Being  in  the  Asia  of 
Xht  Prometheus  Unbound.  "  Life  of  life,"  he  calls  her,  in 
the  Hymn  of  all  her  nymphs.  She  is  the  vital  Love 
which  makes  the  life  of  the  universe.  She  pervades 
every  part  of  the  animate  and  the  so-called  inanimate 
creation,  making  in  everything  a  living  spirit  which  lives 
its  own  life  and  loves  in  its  own  way  ;  so  that  every  in- 
visible molecule  of  vapour  sucked  by  the  sun  from  ocean 
or  the  forest-pool  has  its  own  delightful  indweller.  Prac- 
tically speaking,  this  is  a  view  of  Nature  equivalent  to 
Wordsworth's,  only  that  which  Wordsworth  conceived 
as  Thought  evolving  in  life,  Shelley  conceived  as  Love 
evolving  in  life. 


The  love  whose  smile  kindles  the  universe, 
The  beauty  in  which  all  things  live  and  move. 


Shelley  then  sets  man,  if  he  would  escape  from  the  dark- 
ness of  sense,  face  to  face  with  a  living  world,  whose  joy 
he  might  see,  whose  sympathy  he  might  claim,  whose 
life  he  might  share,  and  whose  life  was  love. 

Had  Tennyson  any  conception  of  this  kind  held,  with 
certain  differences,  by  these  two  poets  with  regard  to 
Nature  ?  Did  he  conceive  of  an  active  life  in  the  nat- 
ural world  and  its  parts  ?  Does  his  Nature  breathe,  enjoy, 
and  love  ?  Can  we  feel  a  personal  affection  for  it,  or  believe 
that  it  gives  some  affection  back  to  us,  or  that  it  is,  with  us, 
a  vital  part  of  a  universal  love,   or  a   universal  thought  ? 


The  Nature-Poetry  475 

I  do  not  think,  save  in  a  few  indefinite  touches  of  fancy, 
or  in  an  isolated  poem  like  the  song  of  The  Brook^  that 
we  find  any  principle  of  this  kind  conceived  by  Tenny- 
son, or  embodied  in  his  Nature-poetry.  His  natural 
world  is  not  of  itself  alive  ;  nor  has  it  anything  to  do 
with  us  of  its  own  accord.  It  is  beautiful  and  sublime  ; 
we  can  feel  for  it  admiration  or  awe  ;  but  it  sends 
nothing  of  itself  to  us.  It  is  the  world  of  the  imagi- 
native scientific  man,  who  has  an  eye  for  beauty,  and  a 
heart  to  feel  it.  Matter  is  matter  to  Tennyson,  though 
no  doubt  he  often  thought  of  it  as  having  no  absolute 
existence.  But  he  saw  it,  when  he  described  it,  in  its 
existence  to  us,  and  in  that  relative  existence  he  felt  no 
conscious  life  in  it. 

There  is,  then,  in  his  poetry  of  Nature  an  entire  absence 
of  that  happy  union  of  heart  to  heart  which  we  feel 
established  between  us  and  Nature  when  we  read  the 
poetry  of  Wordsworth  or  Shelley.  Tennyson,  so  far  as 
Nature  is  concerned,  is  not  our  beloved  companion  in 
the  lonely  places  of  the  hills,  in  the  woods,  beside  the 
stream,  near  the  great  sea,  or  when  we  watch  the  moving 
sky.  We  can  read  him  in  these  places  with  pleasure,  if 
we  read  him  for  his  records  of  humanity,  for  their  pathos 
or  their  joy  ;  but  we  do  not  read  him  if  we  wish  to 
escape  from  humanity  and  to  live  with  Nature  alone. 
There  is  no  warmth,  no  life,  no  love  in  his  Nature.  His 
descriptions  of  what  he  sees  of  the  outside  of  the  world 
are  luminous  and  true,  but  he  does  not  pierce  below  the 
surface  of   phenomena  to  a  living   soul   in  the   universe 


476  Tennyson 

that  enjoys  its  own  life,  and  can  send  that  life  to  meet 
our  own. 

"  So  much  the  better,"  many  persons  will  say.  "  There 
is  no  living  soul  in  Nature.  These  are  the  dreams  of  a 
certain  class  of  poets,  and  we  welcome  Tennyson,  who 
describes  things  as  they  are  with  beauty  and  with 
clearness."  Well,  I  have  no  quarrel  with  these 
persons.  It  is  delightful  to  read  Tennyson's  natural 
descriptions,  and  I  have  shown  in  this  book  that  I  enjoy, 
admire,  and  honour  them.  I  can  even  endure  to  be 
told  that  he  took  care,  as  in  that  description  of  the 
cove  at  Tintagil,  that  everything  he  said  wondrously  of 
the  waves  was  yet  scientifically  true — as  if  that  mattered 
in  poetry.  All  I  desire  to  say  is,  that  this  way  of  look- 
ing at  and  feeling  Nature  is  not  the  way  of  the  other  poets 
of  this  century,  whose  dreams  were  to  them  realities, 
and  who  loved  Nature,  not  as  a  picture,  which  was 
Tennyson's  way,  but  as  a  living  being. 

Again,  when  we  take  Coleridge,  we  are  also  in  contact 
with  a  theory  which  gave  a  life  to  Nature,  so  that  we 
could  feel  in  it  a  spirit  which  answered  to  our  own. 
Nature  was  not,  in  his  poetry,  separate  from  us,  as 
Wordsworth  and  Shelley  held  ;  Nature  was  ourselves. 
The  apparent  world  was  but  the  image  of  our  own 
thoughts.  But  those  thoughts,  and  therefore  the  apparent 
world,  were  part  of  the  life  of  the  great  Spirit.  In  Him 
we  and  the  universe  were  both  alive. 

O  the  one  life  within  us  and  abroad 

Which  meets  all  motion  and  becomes  its  soul ! 


The   Nature-Poetry  477 

We  give,  that  is,  its  life  to  the  universe.  What  answers 
from  it  to  us  is  life,  but  it  is  our  own.  When  we  are 
dull  and  dead  of  heart  we  get  nothing  back  : 

I  may  not  hope  from  outward  forms  to  win 

The  passion  and  the  life,  whose  fountains  are  within. 

And  then  occurs  this  famous  passage  in  which  what  he 
thinks  is  so  clear  that  to  read  it  is  to  understand  : 

O  Lady  !  we  receive  but  what  we  give, 

And  in  our  life  alone  does  Nature  live  ; 

Ours  is  her  wedding  garment,  ours   her  shroud  ! 

And  would  we  aught  behold,  of  higher  worth, 
Than  that  inanimate  cold  world  allowed 
To  the  poor  loveless,  ever-anxious  crowd, 

Ah  !  from  the  soul  itself  must  issue  forth 
A  light,  a  glory,  a  fair  luminous  cloud 

Enveloping  the  Earth — 
And  from  the  soul  itself  must  there  be  sent 

A  sweet  and  potent  voice,  of  its  own  birth, 
Of  all  sweet  sounds  the  life  and  element ! 

Joy  is  the  sweet   voice,  Joy  the  luminous  cloud — 

We  in  ourselves  rejoice  ! 
And  thence  flows  all  that  charms  or  ear  or  sight, 

All  melodies  the  echoes  of  that  voice, 
All  colours  a  suffusion  from  that  light. 

It  is  plain  from  these  lines  that  Nature  lived  to  Cole- 
ridge because  he  lived.  The  universe  breathed  with  our 
being,  and  we  loved  in  it  the  Life  of  God  which  was  in 
ourselves.  Coleridge  never,  then,  describes  Nature  from 
the  outside,  as  if  it  were  a  mere  picture. 

Had  Tennyson  any  notion  of  this  kind  with  regard  to 


478  Tennyson 

the  natural  world  ?  Now  and  again  he  seems  to  ap- 
proach it,  but  he  does  not  grasp  it  as  a  faith.  In  his 
poem,  The  Higher  Pantheism,  he  thinks  of  the  universe 
as  a  Vision.  But  the  vision  is  distorted,  imperfect,  and 
out  of  gear,  because  we  are  distorted,  imperfect,  out  of 
gear.  If  we  could  get  right  and  straight,  that  which  we 
perceive  would  seem  perfect,  as  it  really  is.  For  "  That 
vision — is  it  not  He  ?  "  This  dim,  distorted  theory — as 
contorted  in  itself  as  it  makes  the  universe  of  Nature  be 
to  us — might  be  brought  into  some  relation  to  the  theory 
of  Coleridge,  but  it  is  better  to  pass  it  by,  as  Tennyson 
practically  did.  It  had  no  direct  influence  over  his 
natural  description.     It  leaves  his  Nature  lifeless. 

This  theory  would  not,  perhaps,  have  left  Nature  life- 
less to  him,  if  he  could  have  fully  believed  it.  But  he 
left  it  as  a  suggestion.  It  was  a  question  he  addressed 
to  us  and  the  universe — "  This  vision — is  it  not  He  ?  " 
and  to  this  question  he  had  no  clear  answer  to  give. 
There  is  something,  he  thought,  below  the  appearance 
of  Nature,  but  what  it  is  we  can  only  guess  ;  and  it  may 
be  something  absolutely  different  from  what  we  per- 
ceive the  universe  to  be,  or  what  we  imagine  to  underlie 
our  perception  of  it.  He  believes  that  the  life  of  God 
is  there,  but  what  we  see  and  feel  in  Nature  tells  us 
nothing  true  about  that  life.  We  only  see  that  dis- 
torted image  of  it  which  is  mirrored  by  our  imperfec- 
tion. Hence,  even  when  Tennyson  wrote  about  Nature 
within  this  quasi-pantheistic  theory,  he  could  not  feel 
any  love  for  her,  nor   attribute   any  life  to  her,  because 


The   Nature-Poetry  479 

she  was  only  a  false  picture  of  the  true  world.  But  he 
could  describe  what  he  perceived  ;  and  he  chose  out  of 
all  he  perceived  that  which  he  thought  beautiful,  and 
drew  it  as  it  was  to  the  senses,  not  to  the  soul ;  as 
lifeless  matter,  not  as  living  spirit. 

There  is  another  little  poem  concerning  this  super- 
sensuous,  unattainable  secret  which  is  hidden  below 
phenomena,  and  which  is  contained  in  full  in  every 
separate  part  of   the  whole  : 

Flower  in  the  crannied  wall, 

I  pluck  you  out  of  the  crannies, 

I  hold  you  here,  root  and  all,  in  my  hand, 

Little  flower — but  if  I  could  understand 

What  you  are,  root  and  all,  and  all  in  all, 

I  should  know  what  God  and  man  is. 

Yes,  I  daresay  ;  but  this  sceptical  position  of  mind 
towards  Nature,  this  demand  to  understand,  prevented 
him,  as  a  poet,  from  feeling  any  soul  in  the  universe. 
He  spoke  of  things  only  as  he  saw  them.  He  said,  I 
repeat,  exactly  what  the  scientific  man,  with  an  eye  for 
beauty,  would  wish  to  be  said  about  Nature.  The  de- 
scriptions then  are  vivid,  accurate,  lovely  on  the  out- 
side, but  cold.  They  have  no  voice  of  love  or  comfort 
for  the  heart  of  man.  When  I  say  this,  I  apply  it  only 
to  his  descriptions  of  Nature  apart  from  humanity,  of 
Nature  by  herself.  When  he  mingles  up  human  life 
with  Nature,  then  his  descriptions  of  her  seem  warm. 
But  it  is  the  human  sentiment  transferred  to  Nature 
which  warms  her.      By  herself,  in  the  poetry  of  Tenny- 


480  Tennyson 

son  she  remains  without  any  sympathy  of  her  own 
for  us. 

I  turn  now  to  Walter  Scott  and  Byron,  and  contrast 
them  as  Nature-poets  with  Tennyson.  Neither  of  them 
had  any  of  these  half-philosophic  views  of  Nature,  but 
they  had  a  lively  delight  in  the  natural  world  for  its 
own  sake,  and  in  isolation  from  humanity.  They  could 
spend  hour  after  hour  alone  in  the  wild  land,  thankful 
that  man  did  not  intrude  upon  them,  and  satisfied  to 
the  heart  with  the  beauty  of  solitary  Nature.  In  the 
midst  of  his  story  of  The  Lady  of  the  Lake  or  of  Rokeby, 
Scott  rejoices  to  sever  himself  from  his  human  tale,  and 
to  describe  for  his  own  special  pleasure  the  islands  of 
Loch  Katrine  and  the  narrow  pass  which  led  to  them, 
or  the  glens  of  the  Greta  and  the  Tees,  as  if  there  was 
nothing  else  in  all  the  world  for  which  he  cared. 

Byron  has  the  same  solitary  pleasure  in  Nature,  the 
same  love  of  her  for  her  own  sake,  apart  from  man.  It 
is  the  only  joy  left  to  Manfred,  who  spends  hours  alone 
among  the  icy  splendours  of  the  Alps,  and  loves  to  talk 
with  the  witch  of  the  torrent  when  he  most  hates  to  talk 
with  man.  Byron  rejoices  everywhere  in  his  poetry  to 
lose  humanity  in  Nature.  The  verse  I  quote  from 
Childe  Harold  paints  this  part  of  his  poetic  life  : 


To  sit  on  rocks,  to  muse  o'er  flood  and  fell, 
To  slowly  trace  the  forest's  shady  scene, 

Where  things  that  own  not  man's  dominion  dwell, 
And  mortal  foot  hath  ne'er  or  rarely  been  ; 
To  climb  the  trackless  mountain  all  unseen, 


The  Nature-Poetry  481 

With  the  wild  flock  that  never  needs  a  fold  ; 

Alone  o'er  steeps  and  foaming  falls  to  lean — 
This  is  not  solitude,  't  is  but  to  hold 
Converse  with  Nature's  charms,  and  view  her  stores 
unroll'd. 

There  is  none  of  this  lonely  joy  in  Nature  in  the  poetry 
of  Tennyson.  Man — other  men,  or  himself — always 
intrudes.  Some  friend  steps  in,  some  human  event  that 
has  been  in  the  place,  some  human  passion  which  the 
scene  illustrates.  Tennyson  must  have  his  man.  He  is 
half  afraid  to  be  with  Nature  alone  ;  at  least  he  has  no 
satisfaction  till  he  can  people  his  solitude.  I  scarcely 
remember  a  single  description  of  Nature  for  her  own 
sake,  and  alone,  in  Tennyson  ;  and  this  also  divides  him 
from  all  the  other  poets  of  this  century.  We  lose,  then, 
in  him  that  which  we  still  love — solitary  communion  with 
Nature  away  from  humanity.  That  deliverance  from 
our  trouble,  and  the  world's,  is  not  supplied  to  us  by 
our  poet.  We  are  kept  close  to  the  weariness  of  being 
always  with  mankind.  I  do  not  say  it  is  not  good  for  us  ; 
no  doubt  it  is.  But  for  all  that,  we,  who  desire  a  holi- 
day at  times  from  the  vast  disorder  and  sorrow  of  human 
life,  fall  back  with  a  sigh  of  pleasure  on  Wordsworth  or 
Scott,  on  Shelley,  or  even  on  Byron  ;  and  live  alone  with 
Nature. 

As  to  Keats,  he  has  no  theory  of  one  universal 
Thought  or  Love  pervading  Nature  with  life,  like 
Wordsworth  or  Shelley,  but  he  does  delight  (and  espe- 
cially   in  his  first    poems  before  Endyjmon)    in    Nature 

for  her   own    solitary  sake,   like    Scott   or  Byron.     He 
31 


482  Tennyson 

sits  down  in  a  lonely  place  and  paints  it  piece  by  piece 
with  the  most  observant  joy,  and  neither  his  own 
humanity  nor  that  of  others  disturbs  the  scene.  But  he 
also  has  a  view  with  regard  to  Nature  which  goes  beyond 
that  of  Byron  or  Walter  Scott,  and  which,  though  it  is 
quite  unlike  that  of  Wordsworth  or  Shelley,  has  this 
in  common  with  their  view — that  it  bestows  an  actual 
life  on  Nature.  He  borrows  his  belief  from  the  Greek 
mythology.  The  Greek  did  not  say  that  the  stream  was 
alive,  or  the  tree — but  he  did  say  that  a  living  being. 
Naiad  or  Nymph,  lived  in  the  stream  or  in  the  tree, 
and  was  bound  up  with  them.  This  was  re-introduced 
into  English  poetry  by  Keats,  and  it  lifted  his  Nature 
out  of  death  into  life.  The  whole  material  world,  at 
every  part  of  it,  was  peopled  by  living  beings  who  spoke 
to  us  out  of  the  waves  of  the  sea,  and  the  trees  of  the 
wood,  and  the  flowers  of  the  hills,  out  of  the  mountains 
and  the  streams.  The  beauty  and  glory  of  the  universe 
was  the  beauty  and  glory  of  life.  Hence  he  had  a 
more  intimate  sense  of  loveliness  in  Nature  than  either 
Scott  or  Byron,  and  a  simpler  sense  of  her  life  than 
either  Shelley  or  Wordsworth.  And  this  life  was 
sympathetic  with  our  life.  These  living  beings  could 
communicate  with  us  ;  they  had  something  of  human- 
ity in  them  ;  but  without  our  sense  of  sin,  and 
without  our  weariness.  Even  of  this  kind  of  life 
in  Nature  Tennyson  has  nothing.  He  does  not  even 
deviate  into  it  in  the  classical  poems.  He  had  not 
even  Plato's    tolerance  for    these  pretty   myths,  nor  his 


The  Nature-Poetry  483 

appreciation  of  their  charm.  A  tree  is  a  tree  to  liim,  a 
flower  a  flower,  and  nothing  more.  They  are  so  and  so, 
he  says,  and  he  describes  them  as  lovely  forms  of 
matter,  or  of  what  seems  so  to  us.  He  tells  beautifully 
how  they  seem  to  his  eyes,  with  great  and  delightful 
power,  but  that  is  all  he  does  ;  and  we  desire  something 
more,  something  which  will  leave  us  "  less  forlorn  "  in 
Nature.  We  want  to  touch  life  and  feel  it  replying  to 
our  life, 

Have  sight  of  Proteus  rising  from  the  sea, 
Or  hear  old  Triton  blow  his  wreathed  horn. 

This  is  the  main  statement,  and  it  seems  to  me  true. 
Individual  lines  or  short  passages  might  be  brought 
forward  from  which  we  might  infer  that  he  now  and 
then  touched  some  view  which  thought  of  a  living 
Nature.  But  this  is  only  momentary,  -  and  he  drifts 
within  a  few  pages  into  another  view,  and  then  into 
another  view.  Wordsworth,  Coleridge,  Scott,  Keats, 
Shelley  had  each  of  them  one  clear  conception  of 
Nature  ;  and  all  the  natural  description  of  each  was  influ- 
enced and  ruled  by  the  special  view  held  by  each  of  them. 
Tennyson  wavered  from  view  to  view.  Sometimes  he 
seems  to  hold  that  God  is  full  master  of  the  universe. 
Then  he  slips  in  another  place  into  the  view  that  Nature 
may  be  partly  in  the  hands  of  an  evil  power  and  its  cruel 
will.  Sometimes  he  seems  to  think  that  Nature  is  the 
image  our  distorted  perceptions  make  of  a  divine  order 
and  beauty  which  may  be  spiritual,  or  may  be  material  ; 
sometimes  that  she  is  the  form  Thought  takes  to  us,  and 


484  Tennyson 

therefore  immaterial  ;  sometimes  that  she  is  nothing  but 
matter,  nothing  more  than  the  scientific  materialist 
declares  her  to  be.  But  none  of  these  views  are  fixed  ; 
no  single  one  of  them  is  chosen  and  believed.  They 
run  in  and  out  of  one  another.  He  wavers  incessantly, 
like  the  pure  sceptic,  and  the  result  is  that  all  he  says 
about  Nature  by  herself  makes  no  unity  of  impression 
upon  thought. 

What  is  fixed,  what  is  clear,  what  does  emerge  in  his 
poetry,  after  all  these  philosophic  views  have  been 
played  with,  is  Nature  as  she  appears  to  the  senses,  the 
material  world  in  all  its  variety,  beauty,  and  sublimity, 
seen  as  it  is  on  the  outside.  "  Let  me  tell,"  he  thinks, 
"  beautifully  and  truly  the  facts.  I  see  nothing  cer- 
tainly but  forms,  and  these  I  will  describe."  And 
these  he  does  describe,  with  an  accuracy  unparalleled 
by  any  other  English  poet,  and  with  a  wonderful  beauty 
and  finish  of  words. 

This  is  the  influence  of  his  scientific  reading  upon 
him,  or  rather  of  the  scientific  trend  of  thought  during 
the  years  in  which  he  wrote  his  chief  poems.  His  Nature- 
poetry  was  materialised  ;  it  never  suggests  a  life  in 
Nature  ;  and  it  is  probably  owing  to  his  not  feeling  any- 
thing in  Nature  which  spoke  to  him — soul  to  soul — that 
he  did  not,  after  his  earlier  poems,  ever  appear  to  love 
Nature  for  her  own  sake,  or  care  to  live  with  her  alone. 
By  herself,  she  was  not  sufficient  for  him.  In  fact,  I 
do  not  think  that  I  am  exaggerating  when  I  say  that 
the  Nature-poetry  of  this  century,  which  was  founded 


The  Nature-Poetry  485 

either  on  the  conception  of  a  life  in  Nature,  or  on  en- 
joyment of  her  beauty  and  sublimity  for  her  own  sake 
alone,  without  any  admixture  of  humanity,  is  not  at  all 
represented  in  Tennyson.  Its  decay  in  him  makes  his 
position  in  the  history  of  the  modern  poetry  of  Nature 
of  great  interest.  Moreover,  that  he  naturally  took  a 
line  on  this  matter  of  Nature  which  was  new,  and  which 
on  the  whole  harmonised  with  a  time  given  up  to  the 
scientific  view  of  the  outward  world,  marks  out,  not 
only  his  keen  individuality,   but  his  original  genius. 

Of  course  this  says  that  there  is  no  sentiment  in 
Tennyson's  description  of  Nature — and  this  is  true 
when  he  is  describing  Nature  alone,  as  she  is  in  her- 
self. It  is  not  true  when  he  introduces  humanity  into 
the  scene.  Then  he  groups  Nature  round  the  feelings 
of  men  and  women,  and  the  human  sentiment  is  re- 
flected on  the  physical  world.  Or  he  takes  Nature  up 
into  the  life  and  heart  of  man,  and,  in  illustrating  man 
by  Nature,  colours  Nature  by  human  feeling  ;  or  he 
composes  a  Nature  in  harmony  with  his  own  moods  and 
those  of  his  personages,  and  this  composed  Nature  is 
really  humanity.  In  all  these  ways  Nature  is  made 
full  of  sentiment.  And  the  work  he  has  thus  done  on 
her  is  most  lovely,  far  lovelier  than  his  painting,  beauti- 
ful as  it  is,  of  natural  things  by  themselves  in  lucid 
words  and  with  exquisite  care.  But  the  whole  body  of 
sentiment  which  then  flows  through  the  natural  world  is 
human,  and  only  human.  It  is  associated  with  the  land- 
scape.    It  does  not  come  out  of  Nature  herself — as  it 


486  Tennyson 

would   have   done    in    the  writings    of    Wordsworth    or 
Scott  or  Byron  or  Shelley  or    Keats. 

That  distinctiveness,  however,  makes  us  only  the 
more  eager  to  feel  the  humanised  Nature  of  Tennyson, 
and  to  get  from  it  the  pleasure  that  it  gives.  It  is  a  dif- 
ferent kind  of  pleasure  from  that  given  to  us  by  the 
other  poets  in  regard  of  Nature  ;  or  rather,  the  kind  of 
beauty  which  gives  that  pleasure  was  more  fully  wrought 
out  by  Tennyson  than  by  any  of  the  others.  We  are 
charmed,  then,  by  his  Nature-poetry  when  it  is  human- 
ised, or  when  we  wish  to  remember  ourselves  in  the 
midst  of  Nature.  But  when  we  wish  to  get  rid  of  hu- 
manity and  to  get  rid  of  self-consciousness,  to  touch  a 
Soul  in  Nature,  to  feel  her  life  beat  on  our  life,  to  love 
her  for  herself  alone,  in  her  solitudes — we  find  nothing 
in  Tennyson  to  help  us.  We  are  forced  back  by  his 
Nature-poetry  either  into  human  life,  or  into  the  world 
of  mere  phenomena. 


CHAPTER   XVI 


THE   LATER   POEMS 


IT  is  not  an  infrequent  habit  of  an  artist  to  try  over 
again  in  old  age  the  kinds  of  work  which  pleased 
his  youth.  This  is  his  way  of  re-living  the  days 
when  he  was  young.  Other  men  do  this  in  the  silence 
of  memory.  The  artist  does  it  in  work  ;  and  I  may 
gather  within  this  simple  framework  the  greater  number 
of  those  later  poems  of  Tennyson  which  reach  a  high 
excellence,  or  have  a  special  quality.  He  reverted  to  his 
classical,  romantic,  and  theological  interests.  He  felt 
over  again  the  poetic  sentiment  of  friendship  which  was 
a  characteristic  mark  of  his  youthful  poetry,  but  he  felt 
it  with  a  natural  difference.  He  felt  over  again  in 
memory,  and  reproduced,  also  with  the  natural  differ- 
ence, the  imaginative  ardour  of  a  youth  for  Nature 
and  love 

When  all  the  secret  of  the  Spring, 
Moves  in  the  chambers  of  the  blood  ; 

And,  lastly,  he  returned,  and  with  extraordinary  force, 

487 


488  Tennyson 

in  Afctiin  and  the  Glea/ii,  to  that  pursuit  of  the  ideal 
perfection,  of  the  undiscovered  land,  which  in  ancient 
times  he  had  expressed  in  the  Ulysses. 

First,  then,  with  regard  to  his  interest  in  classic  sub- 
jects and  the  classical  poets,  he  felt  again  the  impulse 
which  long  ago  i)roduced  (Enone  and  Tif/ionits,  and 
shaped  it  now  into  The  Death  of  GLnone.,  and,  perhaps, 
into  Demeter  and  Persephone.  I  have  already  treated 
of  those  poems,  and  need  not  touch  them  again.  But 
something  yet  remains  to  be  said,  in  general  terms, 
about  his  imitations  and  translations  of  the  classic  poets, 
and  of  the  affection  and  the  praise  he  gave  them.  These 
great  masters  of  idea  and  form,  that  is,  of  intellect  and 
beauty,  were  his  daily  companions. 

The  elements  derived  from  this  life-long  association 
with  the  Greek  and  Roman  poets  appear  in  his  earliest 
poems  and  move  like  leaven  through  the  whole  of  his 
work.  They  add  to  the  dignity  of  his  poetry  ;  they 
bring  to  it  a  clear,  reflective  grace  ;  often  an  old-world 
charm,  as  when  some  pure  classic  phrase  carries  with  it 
suddenly  into  an  English  poem  a  breath,  an  odour  of 
Pagan  loveliness.  He  derives  from  them  a  sculptur- 
esque manner  in  verse  which  often  reminds  me  of  the 
limbs  and  of  the  drapery  of  the  figures  in  the  Elgin 
marbles  ;  and  to  their  influence  are  due  his  desire  and 
his  power  to  see  clearly  and  to  describe  with  lucid 
accuracy  things  as  they  appear,  both  in  human  life  and 
in  nature,  and  to  trust  to  this  for  his  effects,  rather  than 
to    any   pathetic  fallacies.      These,  and  other  qualities 


The  Later  Poems  489 

naturally  accordant  with  them,  were  not  created  in  him 
by  the  classics,  but  were  educated,  even  awakened,  in 
him  by  them.  The  curious  thing  which  I  seem  to  de- 
tect in  his  writings,  and  which  is  quite  in  harmony  with 
his  unmixed  English  nature,  is  that  he  is  much  more  in 
sympathy  with  Latin  than  with  Greek  poets,  much  more 
at  one  with  the  genius  of  Rome  than  of  Athens. 

That  tendency  to  over-conciseness,  which  in  his 
dramas  often  reaches  baldness,  may  have  its  root  in  an 
admiration  of  the  Latin  brevity  of  phrase.  But  the  Latin 
language,  as  a  vehicle  of  expression,  did  not  lose  soft  grace 
or  suggestion  of  ornament  in  the  concise  phrase.  The 
English  language,  on  the  contrary,  owing  probably  to  the 
loss  of  its  inflections,  demands  more  expansion  than  the 
Latin,  and  when  its  poetic  phrases  are  pared  down  to  the 
brevity  of  Latin,  they  tend  to  become  too  austere,  too 
abrupt,  too  squat,  for  poetry.  Such  conciseness  does  not 
afford  room  enough  for  pleasurable  and  fitting  ornament  ; 
the  imagination  cannot  indulge  in  delightful  play  or 
colour.  Beauty  does  not  live  and  change  from  point  to 
point  of  the  compressed  verse,  nor  thrill  along  its  move- 
ment. 

Tennyson  indeed  was  not  without  these  sweet  graces. 
His  early  work,  as  well  as  In  Metnon'am,  Maud,  The 
Princess,  and  his  lyrics,  are  rich  with  tender  ornament. 
I  only  wish  to  say  that  he  tended  to  reduce  his  orna- 
ment too  much,  as  other  poets  tend  to  increase  it  too 
much.  And  he  sometimes  grew  cold  and  naked,  so  that 
on  the  whole  we  may  say  of  him  that  he  has  less  of  orna- 


490  Tennyson 

ment  and  imaginative  play  and  soft  changes  than  the 
other  poets  of  this  century.  Nearly  all  his  dramatic 
work,  for  example,  has  this  rigidity,  this  want  of  versa- 
tility and  phantasy  and  self-delight. 

When  Tennyson  wrote  in  this  fashion,  his  verse  re- 
sembles Norman  architecture  in  a  village  church.  It 
has  power,  it  often  fits  the  subject  well,  and  there  is  a 
certain  beauty  in  it  ;  but  it  would  have  had  as  much 
power,  as  much  fitness,  and  far  more  beauty,  had  it  re- 
sembled the  Gothic  of  the  thirteenth  century,  and  been 
more  interesting  from  verse  to  verse  with  lovely  orna- 
ment, with  freer  and  more  gracious  invention  of  detail. 
This  tendency  to  austerity,  to  a  certain  rudeness  or  a 
certain  over-fineness  (the  two  things  often  go  together), 
to  wide  spaces  devoid  of  ornament,  is  partly  due,  I  think, 
to  his  fondness  for  Latin  forms.  The  Greeks  did  not 
suffer  from  this  over-polish,  this  beating  down  of  im- 
pulse, this  educated  severity,  and  necessarily  this  want 
of  freedom.  Tennyson  would  have  been  at  all  points 
an  even  greater  poet  than  he  was  if  he  had  loved  Greece 
more  and  Rome  less.  The  natural  liberty,  the  bold 
invention,  the  swift  following  of  native  impulse  within 
well-defined  but  wide  limits  of  law,  the  fearlessness 
which  felt  that  beauty  was  always  right,  all  of  which 
marked  Greek  poetry,  were  not  as  fully  Tennyson's  as 
they  might  have  been.  He  frequently  pulled  too  hard  at 
the  reins  he  fitted  on  Pegasus,  and  that  soaring  creature 
was  a  little  too  much  subdued  to  the  manege.  His  art 
was  more  Roman  than  Greek. 


The  Later  Poems  491 

The  influence  of  Homer  is  felt  throughout  his  heroic 
poetry,  but  he  missed  the  rush  of  Homer's  verse,  its 
easy  strength  and  freedom.  He  gained  in  his  poetry  a 
great  deal  of  the  Homeric  simplicity,  sonorousness,  and 
tenderness,  but  he  did  not  gain  all  he  might  of  the  variety, 
naturalness,  and  the  constant  entertainment  which  Homer 
brings  to  us  from  line  to  line.  Moreover,  that  extra- 
ordinary flexibility  to  the  world  of  man  which  belonged 
to  Homer,  a  flexibility  to  every  type  of  humanity  as 
great  as  that  of  the  air  to  the  varied  surface  of  the  earth, 
was  only  partly  possessed  by  Tennyson.  In  fact,  the 
time  in  which  he  lived  had  too  much  of  culture  and  too 
little  of  Nature  to  enable  him  to  attain  this  excellence 
fully. 

He  twice  tried  to  translate  Homer — two  celebrated 
passages  in  the  Iliad — and  both  seem  to  me  to  prove  the 
un-Homeric  nature  of  his  art.  They  resemble  failures 
more  than  successes,  and  are  even  less  good  than  might 
have  been  made  by  poets  very  much  his  inferiors.  Per- 
haps a  great  poet  is  specially  ill-fitted  (owing  to  his 
naturally  strong  individuality)  for  translating  another 
great  poet.  But  even  granting  that,  these  translations 
are  overcarefuUy  wrought,  their  art  is  too  self-conscious, 
they  have  no  gallop  in  them,  and  the  sentiment  of  the 
original  has  evaporated.  So  strong  is  the  Tennysonian 
style,  that  Homer  is  changed  into  Tennyson.  Some  of 
this  failure  is  owing  to  the  vehicle  he  chose.  Of  all  forms 
of  possible  English  verse,  blank  verse  is  the  least  fitted 
to  represent  the  Homeric  hexameter.     It  wants  especially 


492  Tennyson 

that  shout  of  the  long  syllable  of  the  final  dactyl  which 
above  everything  else  gives  its  leai)  and  cry  and  force  to 
the  Homeric  line,  and  sends  it  rushing  to  its  close  like 
the  steeds  of  Achilles  to  battle. 

These  Homeric  translations  Avere  the  only  translations 
he  ever  published.  But  he  did  try  to  reproduce  some  of 
the  classic  metres  in  English,  and  succeeded  as  well  as 
others,  so  far  as  the  metres  are  concerned,  and  better 
than  others,  so  far  as  the  usage  of  words  is  concerned. 
The  poem  written  in  alcaics  to  Milton  is  a  beautiful, 
brilliant,  sound-changing,  and  harmonic  thing.  But  it  is 
English  in  note.  Tennyson  never  imitated  ;  in  all  he 
did  he  was  English  and  himself.  Though  he  loved,  as 
I  said,  the  Latin  conciseness,  he  never  wrote  in  the 
manner  of  the  Latin  poets.  The  literary  movement  of 
Lucretius,  though  the  poem  is  Roman  in  feeling  to  the 
backbone,  is  English,  as  it  ought   to  be,  not  Lucretian. 

Again,  Virgil  had  more  influence  over  him  than  Homer  ; 
we  feel  the  power  and  the  delicacy  of  this  master  in 
Tennyson's  poetry,  not  in  imitation,  but  as  a  controlling 
influence  towards  soft  precision  of  phrase  ;  but  had  he 
tried  to  translate  Virgil  he  would  have  entirely  failed. 
There  was  a  rude  Anglo-Saxon  element  in  him  which 
Virgil  could  not  have  endured,  and  which  would  have, 
in  spite  of  every  care,  burst  out  of  his  character  into 
such  a  translation,  and  lowered  the  Virgilian  grace.  It 
may  have  been  owing  to  that  native  roughness  that  he 
admired  Virgil  so  much.  In  these  later  poems  he  wrote 
the  praise  of  Virgil  for  the  Mantuans,  a  homage  he  did 


The  Later  Poems  493 

not  pay  to  Homer.  Old  age  had  increased  his  enjoy- 
ment of  a  poet  he  had  loved  when  a  boy.  The  varied 
kinds  of  Virgil's  work,  his  subtle  excellences,  even  his 
twofold  relation  to  humanity,  are  expressed  with  a  beauty 
and  truth  the  critics  might  envy. 

All  the  charm  of  all  the  Muses 

often  flowering  in  a  lonely  word 

fully  enshrines  what  the  happy  fanatic  of  Virgil  rejoices 
to  have  said  for  him.  *'  I  that  loved  thee,"  he  cries, 
"  since  my  day  began, 

Wielder  of  the  stateliest  measure 

ever  moulded  by  the  lips  of  man." 

"  Stateliest  measure,"  says,  it  seems,  too  much,  and  so  does 
"  ocean-roll  of  rhythm."  Virgil's  verse  is  not  the  state- 
liest, and  the  roll  of  ocean  is  stronger  than  his  rhythm  ; 
but  if  the  phrases  suggest  that  Tennyson  lost  some  of 
his  judgment  in  admiration,  we  like  him  the  more  be- 
cause of  that.  The  praise  also  that  he  gives  is  expressed 
with  that  full  mouth  of  song  which  is  so  rare  in  an  old 
man's  work.  A  line  like  this  that  I  quote  is  like  summer 
itself  in  the  golden  age — 

Summers  of  the  snakeless  meadow, 

unlaborious  earth  and  oarless  sea. 

Nor  are  these  lines  less  noble  which  tell  of  the  everlasting 
power  of  Virgil,  whose  imperial  verse  shall  live  when 
empires  are  like  the  phantoms  through  whom  ^neas 
went,  bearing  the  branch  of  gold  : 


494  Tennyson 

Light  among  the  vanish'd  ages  ; 

star  that  gildest  yet  this  phantom  shore  ; 
Golden  branch  amid  the  shadows, 

kings  and  realms  that  pass  to  rise  no  more. 

Then,  too,  Catullus,  as  well  as  Virgil,  engaged  his 
heart.  He  had  endeavoured  in  time  past  after  the  metre 
Catullus  used  to  the  despair  of  his  peers — "  so  fan- 
tastical is  the  dainty  metre."  But  now,  in  his  old  age, 
he  passed  from  the  metre  to  the  spirit  of  that  poet,  and 
felt  over  again,  and  with  his  own  tenderness,  and  in  the 
lovely  place  where  the  Latin  singer  sometimes  dwelt, 
the  softly-raining  tenderness  of  Catullus  for  those  he 
loved.  Frater  Ave  atque  Vale,  he  cried  among  the  olive 
terraces  of  Sirmione.  For  these,  then,  for  Virgil,  Catul- 
lus, even  for  Lucretius,  he  was  more  fit  comrade  than 
for  Homer.  Art  cultivated  into  that  which  is  a  little 
more  over-refined  than  Nature  was  more  to  him  than 
the  art  which  itself  is  Nature. 

Next,  Tennyson  not  only  reverted  to  these  classical 
subjects,  he  also  reclaimed  his  pleasure  in  Romance. 
Old  age,  though  it  cannot  act  romance,  lives  all  the 
more  fully  with  it  in  the  chambers  of  the  heart.  Its 
stories,  its  sentiment,  far  outside  of  the  daily  world 
with  which  the  sage  has  long  been  weary,  enchant  the 
soul  even  more  than  in  early  youth.  It  is  one  of  the 
worst  misfortunes  of  an  artist's  old  age,  that  his  hand 
can  no  more  express  in  sculpture  or  in  painting,  and  his 
brain  no  more  shape  in  music  or  in  poetry,  all  the  beauty 
which  he  feels.     It  were  better  perhaps  that  he   left  the 


The  Later  Poems  495 

shaping  aside,  and  were  content  with  thoughts  alone  and 
their  emotions.  But  it  is  hard  not  to  try,  and  Tennyson 
tried  in  The  Falcon  a  tale  of  Boccaccio,  and  in  The 
Foresters  the  woodland  legend  of  Robin  Hood.  Both 
dramas  are  quite  unworthy  of  his  hand  ;  and  when 
Oberon,  Titania,  and  their  fairies  enter  the  groves  we 
hear  how  sadly  they  have  deteriorated  since  the  days  of 
Theseus.  Shakspere's  Oberon  and  Titania  are  royal 
personages,  and,  though  Mustard,  Pease-blossom,  and 
the  rest  make  their  own  jokes  on  Bottom,  they  would 
have  sooner  died  than  have  called  Oberon  "  Ob.,"  or 
Titania  "Tit."  This  is  the  humour  of  The  Spinster's 
Sjveet-arts  imposed  on  Fairyland,  and  it  is  incredibly 
clumsy. 

Driven  by  the  same  feeling  for  Romance,  he  had 
already  written  in  the  volume  of  1880  on  an  Irish  tale, 
seeking  all  too  late  that  plenteous  fountain  of  imagina- 
tive work.  The  Voyage  of  Maeldunc  is  a  fine  piece  of 
scenic  power,  written  with  extraordinary  vigour  and  in 
racing  rhythm,  but  it  has  no  soul,  and  is  stripped  clean 
of  the  Celtic  charm  and  of  the  Celtic  pathos.  Tennyson 
loses  all  the  sentiment  of  the  original  by  imposing  on  the 
voyagers  his  own  conception  of  the  Irish  character. 
The  warriors  who  sail  boast  loudly  of  their  descent  ; 
the  slightest  thing  flusters  them  with  anger  ;  they  shout, 
and  hate,  and  wallow  in  flowers  and  tear  them  up  in  a 
blind  passion,  and  gorge,  and  madden,  and  chant  the 
glories  of  Finn,  and  fight  with  one  another,  and  slay,  till 
only  a  tithe  of  them  return.     This  is  the  English  form 


496  Tennyson 

which  he  gave  to  the  story — the  English  pleasure  in 
rough-and-tumble  killing  for  amusement,  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  brutality  imposed  upon  the  Irish  nature.  Did  it 
seem  to  him  quite  impossible  that  sixty  comrades 
should  sail  together  and  be  excited  by  various  adven- 
tures, without  falling  out  furiously  with  one  another? 
There  is  not  a  trace  of  this  in  the  original.  All  are 
faithful,  loving,  and  tender  comrades.  Not  one  of  them 
acts  like  a  drunken  sailor  at  a  Portsmouth  fair.  There 
is  no  boasting,  no  fighting,  and  no  slaying.  They  all 
return  in  safety,  save  three,  who  did  not  belong  to 
the  band.  A  gentle  air  of  half-religious,  half-romantic 
sentiment  fills  the  tale  :  and  a  little  indignation,  mixed 
with  a  little  amusement,  belongs  to  the  reader  who  finds 
the  sorrowful  romance  of  the  story  lost  in  the  English 
rudeness. 

Indeed,  all  his  life  long,  Tennyson,  though  he  did  love 
the  Welsh  tale  of  Arthur,  never  felt,  or  was  capable  of 
feeling,  the  Celtic  spirit.  He  felt  something  which  he 
thought  was  it,  but  it  was  not.  The  Celtic  magic 
which  Arnold  traced  in  English  poetry  was  in  another 
world  than  Tennyson's.  Other  poets  have  the  Celtic 
strain  in  their  blood,  and  it  passes  into  their  song,  but 
Tennyson  is  the  unmixed  English  type.  He  is  the 
poetic  flowering  of  pure  Anglo-Saxonism,  the  very  best 
it  could  do  alone  ;  and  a  noble,  fair,  and  splendid  flower 
it  is.  But  he  would  have  climbed  to  a  higher  ledge  of 
Parnassus  if  he  had  been  baptised  in  the  Celtic  waters. 
As  it   was,    he   was   only    English,   and   the    statement 


The  Later  Poems  497 

accounts  for  many  things,  both  good  and  bad,  in  his 
poetry,  on  which  I  need  not  dwell.  It  accounts,  among 
the  rest,  for  the  Anglicising  of  Arthur's  character  and 
of  his  tale.  A  man  with  a  grain  of  the  Celtic  nature  in 
him  could  never  have  written  the  Idylls  of  the  King  as 
Tennyson  has  written  it. 

Again,  he  reverted  to  his  old  theological  interests. 
I  have  already  shown  how  full  he  became  of  the  ques- 
tion of  Immortality.  The  nobly  composed  poem  of 
Vastness  is  written  to  enforce  a  conclusion  of  the  truth 
of  that  doctrine.  Despair,  the  terrible  pathos  of  which 
he  need  not  have  lessened  by  an  intrusion  of  his  own 
personal  wrath  with  those  who  believed  in  everlasting 
death  or  in  everlasting  hell,  is  a  powerful  plea  for  the 
immortality  a  God  of  Love  would  naturally  secure  for 
man.  His  poems  to  friends,  and  on  the  death  of  friends, 
are  all  touched  with  eternal  hopes,  with  his  constant  cry 
— Life  and  Love  are  not  worth  living  and  loving  unless 
they  continue,  and  only  in  their  continuance  is  the 
problem  of  earth's  trouble  solved.  The  Ancient  Sage, 
as  we  have  seen,  took  up  again  this  question,  and  others 
related  to  it — the  questions  of  The  Two  Voices,  of  In 
Meynoriani. 

Another  poem  of  his,  St.  Telemachus,  recurred  to  the 

same  theological  motive  which  he  treated  in  his  attack 

on  asceticism  in   the  Idylls  of  the  King  and  St.  Simeon 

Stylites.     Let   the  anchorite,  it  says,  no   longer  live  his 

deedless  life.     Better  be  stoned  to  death  in  the  Forum, 

and  slay  a  vile  custom,  than  pray  and  fast,  with  life,  in 
32 


498  Tennyson 

the  wilderhess  !  Fine  things  are  in  it — Rome  flaring 
lurid,  in  the  hermit's  imagination,  at  every  western  sun- 
set, and  calling  him  forth  to  act  ;  the  description  of  the 
crowd  pressing  to  the  Coliseum,  and  of  Telemachus 
borne  along  by  that  full  stream  of  men, 

Like  some  old  wreck  on  some  indrawing  wave. 

I  do  not  know  if  this  poem  belong  truly  to  his  old  age, 
but  it  has  not  the  mighty  grip  with  which  Tennyson 
would  have  seized  on  such  a  subject  in  his  youth  and 
manhood. 

In  the  very  last  volume,  this  return  to  his  early  theo- 
logical interests  continues.  Akbars  Dreatn  records 
how,  in  the  poet's  mind,  all  religious  differences  were 
merged  into  one  religion  of  goodness  and  love  ;  nor 
does  the  poem  want  phrases  of  force  and  breadth.  A 
gentle  air,  a  kindly  quiet,  as  of  one  who  already  felt 
the  soft  sunlight  of  a  higher  peace  than  ours,  broods 
over  all  the  late  religious  poems. 

There  is  yet  another  matter  in  which  an  old  man 
reverts  to  his  youth  ;  and  this  is  the  emotional  senti- 
ment of  friendship.  Mature  manhood  has  not  less  of 
friendship  than  youth,  but  it  has  little  time  to  cherish 
its  sentiment.  In  youth  it  is  different.  We  have  then 
time  to  hover  over  a  friendship,  to  prophesy  about  it, 
to  take  it  with  us  for  inward  pleasure,  or,  if  we  have 
lost  a  friend,  for  sorrow  of  contemplation.  In  Memo- 
riam  is  full  of  that  contemplative  emotion,  and  Tenny- 
son was  young  when  he  began  to  write  it.     The  poem 


The  Later  Poems  499 

entitled  To  y.  S.,  beautiful  throughout  with  a  soft 
steadiness  of  chastened  thought,  and  loveliest  at  its 
close,  is  also  written  in  the  air  of  this  youthful  sen- 
timent, but  it  is  raingled  with  a  wisdom  rare  in 
youth, 

A  later  kind  of  friendship,  that  of  a  man  who  has 
realised  life  and  finds  his  affection  deepen  to  his  friend, 
not  through  imaginative  feeling,  but  through  interchange 
of  character  with  him,  and  through  their  interest 
in  humanity,  breathes  in  the  poem  To  the  Rev.  F.  D. 
Maurice  ;  as  good  in  its  gay  contented  way  as  Milton's 
sonnets  to  Lawrence  and  to  Cyriack  Skinner,  the  note 
of  which,  in  a  different  form  of  verse,  it  emulates.  But 
the  earlier  sentiment  still  lives  at  times.  It  is  not 
spread  now  over  the  whole  of  life,  but  arises  for  a  brief 
period  in  lonely  hours,  and  only  for  the  dead.  There 
are  two  poems — In  the  Garden  at  Swainston  and  In  the 
Valley  of  Cauteretz — which  touch  the  depths  of  man- 
hood's friendship  in  regret. 

When  age  comes,  there  is  a  further  change.  The 
sentiment  of  friendship  is  now  like  that  felt  in  youth, 
but  the  waters  from  Avhich  it  arises  are  different,  and 
its  horizon  is  also  different.  The  work  of  life  is  over, 
and  emotion,  as  in  the  days  of  youth,  has  again  time 
to  feel  itself.  Moreover,  the  sadness  of  decay,  though 
it  be  not  allowed  to  master  the  soul,  yet  brings  an 
autumn  mist  over  the  landscape  of  life,  in  which  all 
thoughts  are  mellowed,  and  lays  on  all  its  woods  a 
lovely  colouring,  with  the  beauty  of  which  the  old  man 


500  Tennyson 

is  charmed,  with  which  he  plays,  but  which  he  knows 
is  beauty  that  is  departing.  What  we  thus  feel  for  our- 
selves, we  feel  also  for  our  friends  who  have  grown  old 
with  us.  They,  too,  are  in  their  Indian  summer,  and 
year  by  year  the  final  frost,  touching  one  or  another  of 
them,  warns  us  of  our  own  death.  We  cannot  look  for- 
ward to  an  enjoyment  of  their  friendship  as  we  did 
when  we  were  young  ;  but  those  who  believe,  like 
Tennyson,  in  a  life  to  come,  think  of  friendship  re- 
newed in  a  world  where  life  is  winterless. 

These  various  emotions  are  a  new  source  of  poetic 
impulse  which,  in  regard  of  friendship,  is  almost  more 
productive  of  poetry  than  its  sentiment  in  youth. 
Thousands  of  poems  have  been  written  in  their  atmos- 
phere, and  a  collection  of  them — for  they  have  aspecial 
quality  and  a  unity  of  emotion — would  be  of  abiding 
interest  and  pleasure.  Some  recover  a  little  of  the 
gaiety  of  youth  ;  others  have  a  trembling  pleasure, 
such  as  a  tree  all  gold  and  crimson  might  have  in  its 
own  loveliness,  with  the  knowledge  in  its  pleasure  that 
the  coming  night  may  send  the  storm  to  strip  it  bare. 
But  if  the  poet  be  a  person  of  an  equal  mind,  such 
poems  have  a  courageous  air,  a  kindly  tolerance,  a 
wisdom  inwoven  with  love,  a  gratitude  to  life  for  all  its 
joy,  even  for  the  strength  of  its  sorrows  ;  and  often  a 
delightful  brightness  as  of  a  veteran  who  has  kept  his 
shield  in  all  his  battles,  and  who  waits  peacefully  for 
the  last  calling  of  the  roll. 

Many  such  poems,    chiefly   of    Dedication,   occur  in 


The  Later  Poems  501 

the  later  volumes  of  Tennyson.  They  ought  to  be 
read  together  when  we  desire  to  feel  his  grace  and 
power  in  this  special  kind  of  poetry,  which  no  one,  I 
think,  has  ever  done  so  well.  They  are  revelations  of 
character,  and  of  a  character  made  braver  and  kindlier 
by  old  age.  No  trace  of  cynicism  deforms  them,  and 
their  little  sadness  is  balanced  by  a  soft  and  sunny 
clearness,  by  tenderness  in  memory  and  magnanimity 
of  hope.  Each  of  them  is  also  tinged  with  the  indi- 
viduality of  the  person  to  whom  it  was  written.  The 
poems  to  Edward  Fitzgerald,  to  his  brother,  to  Mary 
Boyle,  to  Lord  Dufferin,  possess  these  qualities,  and 
are  drenched,  as  it  were,  with  the  dew  of  this  delicate 
sentiment  peculiar  to  old  age.  They  look  backward, 
therefore,  but  they  also  look  forward  ;  and  not  only 
friends  on  earth,  but  those  who  have  found  their  life  in 
death,  enter  into  their  hour  of  prospect  and  of  retrospect. 

When  the  dumb  Hour,  clothed  in  black, 
Brings  the  Dreams  about  my  bed, 
Call  me  not  so  often  back, 
Silent  Voices  of  the  dead, 
Toward  the  lowland  ways  behind  me, 
And  the  sunlight  that  is  gone  ! 
Call  me  rather,  silent  voices, 
Forward  to  the  starry  track 
Glimmering  up  the  heights  beyond  me 
On,  and  always  on  ! 

The  Silent  Voices. 

Again,  correlative  with  the  sentiment  which  inspires 
these  poems,  there  is  another  kind  of  poetry  which  is 


502  Tennyson 

naturally  written  in  old  age,  and  recurs  to  those  motives 
of  youth  which  arise  out  of  the  happiness  of  the  world 
and  of  the  poet  in  the  awakening  of  life  in  Spring. 
This  poetry  is  born  out  of  the  memories  of  that  early 
joy,  and  is  also  touched  with  a  distinctive  sentiment, 
native  only  to  old  age,  delicately  clear,  having  a  breath 
of  the  colour  and  warmth  of  youth,  and  flushed  with  the 
hope  of  its  re-awakening.  Its  poems  are  like  those 
February  days  which  enter  from  time  to  time  into  the 
wintry  world,  so  genial  in  their  misty  sunlight  that  the 
earth  seems  then  to  breathe  like  a  sleeping  woman  and 
her  bosom  to  heave  with  a  dream  of  coming  pleasure. 
They  recall  the  past,  and  prophesy  the  immortal.  Spring. 
Old  age  often  feels  this  sentiment,  but  is  rarely  able  to 
shape  it  ;  but  when,  by  good  fortune,  it  can  be  shaped, 
the  poem  has  a  unique  charm.  Of  such  poems  The 
Throstle  is  one,  and  Early  Spring  is  another.  They  may 
have  been  originally  conceived,  or  even  written,  in 
earlier  days,  but  I  am  sure  that  they  were  re-written  in 
old  age,  and  in  its  evening  air. 

Lastly,  there  are  the  poems  and  those  portions  of 
poems  which  are  inflamed  with  the  spirit  that  pursues 
after  the  perfection  of  beauty.  Of  these  Merlin  and  the 
Gleam  is  the  best.  It  is  this  spirit  in  his  work,  as  it  is  in 
the  work  of  all  great  artists,  which  gives  Tennyson  his 
greatest  power  over  the  heart  of  humanity  ;  and,  though 
I  have  dwelt  on  it  at  the  beginning  of  this  book,  I  can- 
not do  better  than  dwell  upon  it  at  the  end,  but  in  a 
closer  connection  with    his  poetry.     To  quote  all  the 


The  Later  Poems  503 

passages  which  illustrate  this  temper  of  his  would 
occupy  too  large  a  space  ;  but  a  long  selection  might  be 
made  of  them,  until  we  come  to  the  later  poems  in 
which  this  enkindling  aspiration  burns  with  as  clear  a 
flame  as  in  the  days  of  his  youth.  It  is  even  more 
ethereal,  of  a  more  subtle  spirit. 

Tennyson  was  never  content  with  the. visible  and  the 
material,  never  enslaved  by  that  which  our  world  calls 
the  practical.  He  never  believed  that  the  things  of 
sense  were  other  than  illusions,  which  dimly  represented 
or  distorted  the  true  substance  of  beauty  that  lay  be- 
yond the  senses.  His  life,  like  every  faithful  artist's  life, 
was,  therefore,  incessant  pursuit.  The  true  device  of 
the  artist,  as  it  is  of  the  religious  man  in  religion,  is 
this  :  "  While  we  look  not  at  the  things  which  are  seen 
and  temporal,  but  at  the  things  which  are  not  seen  and 
eternal "  ;  and  what  the  visible  world  said  or  offered  to 
Tennyson,  however  now  and  then  he  was  disturbed  by 
the  temporary  and  material,  was  in  reality  nothing  to 
him.  It  had  no  influence  upon  his  work.  "  Brothers,  I 
count  not  myself  to  have  attained,  but  I  press  forward," 
is  also  as  much  a  device  of  the  artist  as  it  is  of  the  saint. 
Both,  in  their  several  spheres,  write  that  motto  on  their 
soul.  And  Tennyson  never  found  finality  in  his  art, 
never  had  any  satisfaction,  save  for  the  moment  of  com- 
pletion, in  the  outward  form  he  gave  to  his  subject. 

It  is  the  Idea  after  which  the  artist  runs.  The  mo- 
ment one  form  of  it  is  realised,  it  opens  out  something 
more   to  be  pursued,  and   when  that  is  seized,  it  dis- 


504  Tennyson 

closes,  in  its  turn,  another  island  on  the  far  horizon  to 
which  he  is  bound  to  sail : 

Gleams  that  untravell'd  world  whose  margin  fades 
For  ever  and  for  ever  when  I  move. 

To  linger  in  the  attainable  is  the  death  of  art,  "  Be 
perfect  in  love,",  said  Jesus,  "  as  your  Father  in  heaven 
is  perfect  in  love."  Be  perfect  in  beauty,  he  would  say 
to  the  artist,  as  your  Father  in  heaven  is  perfect  in 
beauty.  And  indeed,  in  a  wider  world  than  ours,  the 
two  sayings  are  one,  for  Beauty  is  the  form  of  Love.  At 
this  point,  that  word  of  Blake's  is  true  :  "  Christianity 
is  Art,  and  Art  is  Christianity."  Nor  in  this  view  is 
humanity  neglected,  for  whom  the  poet  writes  and  the 
painter  paints.  For,  since  to  love  beauty  is  as  ultimate 
an  end  for  man  as  to  love  goodness  and  to  love  truth, 
the  life  of  the  artist  is  necessarily  lived  for  mankind. 
There  is  no  higher  life  in  all  the  world,  nor  one  more 
difficult  and  tempted.  But  the  greatness  of  the  strife  is 
tempered  by  the  beauty  and  glory  of  the  ideal  world 
in  which  the  Maker  lives,  the  light  of  which  is  not  of  the 
sun  or  moon,  or  stars,  but  of  the  central  source, 

pure  ethereal  stream, 
Whose  fountain  who  shall  tell  ! 

Tennyson  had  long  since  embodied  his  view  of  this 
world  beyond  the  world  we  see,  in  which  thought  and 
feeling  follow  the  ineffable  and  infinite,  in  his  poem 
entitled  The  Voice  arid  the  Peak.     .A.11  night  the  voices  of 


The  Later  Poems  505 

the  ocean  and  the  waters  of  the  earth  cried  to  the  silent 
peak  ;  and  the  poet  asks,  "  Hast  thou  no  voice,  O  peak  ? " 
All  the  voices,  it  answers,  rise  and  die,  and  I,  too,  shall 
fall  and  pass  ;  and  the  earth  below  me  feels  the  desire 
of  the  deep  and  falls  into  it,  and  is  no  more.  The  out- 
ward world  vanishes  away.  Then  the  poet  replies  : 
There  is  another  world  above  the  senses  that  dies  not, 
the  world  of  the  invisible  thought  of  man — 

The  Peak  is  high  and  flush 'd 

At  his  highest  with  sunrise  fire  ; 
The  Peak  is  high,  and  the  stars  are  high, 

And  the  thought  of  a  man  is  higher. 

A  deep  below  the  deep, 

And  a  height  beyond  the  height  I 
Our  hearing  is  not  hearing 

And  our  seeing  is  not  sight. 

What  is  one  to  do  who  lives  in  this  world  above  the 
visible,  where  he  sees  the  uncreated  light .''  ^Vhat  but 
to  leave  all  the  material,  and  follow  the  far-off  vision  ? 
Some  there  are,  said  Tennyson  in  The  Two  Voices  fifty 
years  ago, 

Who,  rowing  hard  against  the  stream, 
Saw  distant  gates  of  Eden  gleam, 
And  did  not  dream  it  was  a  dream. 

Later  on,  he  threw  the  passion  of  this  spiritual  pursuit 
into  a  different  form  in  The  Voyage  ;  painting  this  aspira- 
tion in  those  that  feel  it  with  too  much  lightness  of 
character,  as  if  it  were  only  a  gny  love  of  youth  ;  but 


5o6  Tennyson 

yet  who  never  turned  aside  from  it — the  happy  tribe  who 
know  not  the  unremitting  strife,  the  serious  passion,  or 
the  awful  vision  of  the  unapproachable  loveliness,  which 
are  the  badge  and  the  burden  of  the  greater  artists. 

For  one  fair  Vision  ever  fled 

Down  the  waste  waters  day  and  night, 
And  still  we  follow'd  where  she  led, 

In  hope  to  gain  upon  her  flight. 
Her  face  was  evermore  unseen, 

And  fixt  upon  the  far  sea-line  ; 
And  each  man  murmur'd,  "  O  my  Queen, 

I  follow  till  I  make  thee  mine." 

But  with  Tennyson  it  was  a  far  graver  matter.  He 
was,  even  to  his  death,  the  follower  of  the  mightier 
vision,  of  the  supernal  gleam.  This  is  the  subject  of  a 
poem  which  appears  in  these  volumes  of  his  old  age — 
Merlin  and  the  Gleam  ;  as  lovely  in  form  and  rhythm  and 
imagination  as  it  is  noble  in  thought  and  emotion.  It 
speaks  to  all  poetic  hearts  in  England  ;  it  tells  them  of 
his  coming  death.  It  then  recalls  his  past,  his  youth, 
his  manhood  ;  his  early  poems,  his  critics,  his  central 
labour  on  Arthur's  tale  ;  and  we  see  through  its  verse 
clear  into  the  inmost  chamber  of  his  heart.  What  sits 
there  upon  the  throne  ;  what  has  always  sat  thereon  ? 
It  is  the  undying  longing  and  search  after  the  ideal  light, 
the  mother-passion  of  all  the  supreme  artists  of  the 
world.     "  I  am  Merlin,  who  follow  The  Gleam." 

I  know  no  poem  of  Tennyson's  which  more  takes  my 
heart  with  magic  and  beauty  ;  but  that  is  a  personal 
feeling,  not  a  critical  judgment.     Yet  how  lovely,  how 


The  Later  Poems  507 

pathetic,  and  how  noble  on  the  old  man's  lips  is  the 
beginning  : 

O  young  Mariner, 
You  from  the  haven 
Under  the  sea-cliff, 
You  that  are  watching 
The  gray  Magician 
With  eyes  of  wonder, 
/am  Merlin, 
And  /  am  dying, 
/am  Merlin 
Who  follow  The  Gleam. 

Verse  by  verse  we  company  with  the  poet  flying  forward 
to  the  Gleam.  To  pursue  it  is  the  love  of  life  ;  to  die  in 
its  pursuit  is  joy,  for  beyond  death  its  glory  shines. 
Therefore  now,  on  the  verge  of  death,  he  gives  his  last 
message  to  the  young,  calling  on  them  to  follow,  as  he 
has  done,  the  light  that  was  never  reached,  but  never 
failed  ; 

And  so  to  the  land's 

Last  limit  I  came — 

And  can  no  longer, 

But  die  rejoicing, 

For  thro'  the  Magic 

Of  Him  the  Mighty, 

Who  taught  me  in  childhood, 

There  on  the  border 

Of  boundless  Ocean, 

And  all  but  in  Heaven 

Hovers  The  Gleam. 


Not  of  the  sunlight, 
Not  of  moonlight, 


5o8  Tennyson 

Nor  of  the  starlight  ! 
O  young  Mariner, 
Down  to  the  haven, 
Call  your  companions, 
Launch  your  vessel, 
And  crowd  your  canvas, 
And,  ere  it  vanishes 
Over  the  margin. 
After  it,  follow  it. 
Follow  The  Gleam. 

Who  would  not  wish  to  have  written  that  ?  Who  would 
not  wish  to  have  so  lived  as  to  be  able  to  leave  that  last 
impulse  to  the  young,  to  cry  in  death  that  prophet-cry  ! 
It  is  a  cry  all  the  more  forcible  on  his  lips  because,  with 
all  this  passion  for  the  ideal,  he  kept  so  close  to  the 
actual  life  of  men,  clinging  as  intimately  to  the  common 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  his  time,  so  far  as  his  range 
permitted,  as  the  grass  to  the  varied  surface  of  the  earth. 
But  dear  as  the  real  was  to  him,  the  ideal  was  dearer 
still. 

These  then  are  the  things  I  have  tried  to  say  of  his 
work  in  old  age.  And  now,  having  walked  so  long  with 
a  great  poet,  it  is  hard  to  part  from  him.  We  have 
lived  in  a  large  and  varied  world,  with  its  own  land- 
scape and  its  own  indwellers  ;  no  transient  world, 
reflecting  as  in  a  bubble  of  air  the  passions  and  follies, 
the  tendencies  and  the  knowledge  of  the  hour,  but  a 
solid  sphere  built  slowly  during  a  lifetime  into  form. 
Forty  years  of  creation  were  given  to  make  this  new 
country  of  the  imagination,  which  men  will  visit,  and  in 
which  they  will   wander  with  pleasure,  while  humanity 


The  Later  Poems 


509 


endures.  Every  one  who  in  the  centuries  to  come  shall 
spend  therein  his  leisure  will  leave  it  and  return  to  his 
daily  work,  consoled  and  cheered,  more  wise  and  more 
loving,  less  weary  and  heavy-laden,  nearer  to  beauty  and 
to  righteousness,  more  inspired  and  more  exalted.  The 
permanence  of  the  work  of  Tennyson  is  secure.  Few 
are  his  failures,  many  his  successes  ;  and  I  trust  that 
this  study  of  him  will  make  men  who  love  him  love  him 
more,  and  those  who  do  not  yet  love  him  find  that 
constant  pleasure. 


INDEX 


OF  PASSAGES  RELATING  TO   POEMS 

Achilles  over  the  Trench,  492 

Adeline,  62 

Akbar's  Dream,  498 

Ancient  Sage,  The,  454  «,,  456-459,  463-465,  497 

Arabian  Nights,  Recollections  of  the,  64,  66 

Audley  Court,  lor,  104,  393 

Aylmer  s  Field,  230,  392,  412-419,  462 

Balin  and  Balan,  291-297 

Boadicea,  403 

"Break,  break,  break,"  loi,  197 

"  Britons,  guard  your  own,"  231 

Brook,  The,  76,  92,  229,  392,  425-430,  475 

By  an  Evolutionist,  29,  467 

Character,  A,  75 

Charge  of  the  Light  Brigade,  The,  35,  234,  237 

Charge  of  the  Heavy  Brigade,  The,  235 

Claribel,  62 

Columbus,  406 

"  Come  not  when  I  am  dead,"  100 

Coming  of  Arthur,  The,  259-260,  268-275,  452 

Confessions  of  a  Second-rate  Sensitive  Miii<l.  Supposed,  26,  61 

Crossing  the  Bar,  29,  467 


5T2  Index 

Daisy,  The,  79 

Dawn,  The,  47 

Day-Dream,  The,  96 

Death  of  (linone,  The,  142-144,  488 

Death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  Ode  on  the,  231-234 

Defence  of  Lucknow,  The,  35,  236 

Demeter  and  Persephone,  139-141,  488 

De  Profundis,  4,  449,  453-455 

Despair,  9,  28,  40S,  436,  497 

Dora,  76,  92,  loi,  230,  394-396 

Doubt  and  Prayer,  30 

Dramas,  The,  432-436,  489 

The  Falcon,  495 

The  Foresters,  495 

The  Promise  of  May,  9,  29,  463 
Dreamer,  The,  30 

Dufferin  and  Ava,  To  the  Marquis  of,  501 
Dying  Swan,  The,  64 

Eagle,  The,  411 

Early  Spring,  502 

Edward  Gray,  100 

Edwin  Morris  ;  or,  the  Lake,  loi,  i6g 

English  War-song,  62 

Enoch  Arden,  76,  92,  230,  392-403,  412,  413,  414,    462 

Evolutionist,  By  an,  29,  467 

Faith,  30 

Falcon,  The,  495 

"  Far,  far  away,"  457 

Fatima,  201 

First  Quarrel,  The,  436 

Fitzgerald,  To  E.,  501 

"  Flower  in  the  crannied  wall,"  479 

Foresters,  The,  495 

Frater  Ave  atque  Vale,  494 

Gardener's  Daughter,  The,  76,  92,  94,  102-103,  297,  392,  427 
Gareth  and  Lynette,  275-282 


Index  513 


Geraint  and  Enid,  282-291 
God  and  the  Universe,  30 
Golden  Supper,  The,  57 
Golden  Year,  The,  loi,  393 
Grandmother,  The,  230,  427 
Guinevere,  357-370 

"  Hands  All  Round,"  231 
Happy,  460  n. 
Higher  Pantheism,  The,  478 
Holy  Grail,  The,  150,  319-336 

Idylls  of  the  King,  19,  50,  76,  85,  118,  130,  145,  146,  255-26S,  497 
The  Coming  of  Arthur,  259-260,  268-275,  452 
Gareth  and  Lynette,  275-282 


The  Marriage  of  Geraint    )    „ 

^      ■  ,  X-   . ,  t-  282-291 

Geraint  and  Lnid  ) 


Balin  and  Balan,  291-297 

Merlin  and  Vivien,  297-312 

Lancelot  and  Elaine,  312-319 

The  Holy  Grail,  319-336 

Pelleas  and  Ettarre,  336-341 

The  Last  Tournament,  341-350 

Guinevere,  357-370 

The  Passing  of  Arthur,  370-391 

Lancelot,  350-357 
In  Memoriam,  18,  19,  20,  26,   29,    58,    85,  145,  188-228,  332,  374, 

375,  407,  450,  452,  460,  466,  489,  497,  498 
In  the  Garden  at  Swainston,  499 
In  the  Valley  of  the  Cauteretz,  427,  499 

J.  S.,  To,  499 

Lady  of  Shalott,  The,  118,  128-129,  258,  312 

Lancelot  and  Elaine,  312-319 

Launcelot  and  Guinevere,  128 

Last  Tournament,  The,  341-350 

Lilian,  62 

Locksley  Hall,  43,  45,  47,  78,  96,  99,  104,  109,  151,  169 


514  Index 

Locksley  Hall,  Sixty  Years  After,  436-443 

Lotos-Eaters,  The,  67,  79,  110-112,  121-125 

Love  and  Death,  64 

Love  and  Duty,  96,  97,  393 

Lover's  Tale,  The,  57,  407 

'*  Love  thou  thy  land,"  40,  1 53 

Lucretius,  136-138,  492 

Madeline,  62 

Making  of  Man,  The,  30 

Mariana,  64,  65 

Mariana  in  the  South,  78 

Marriage  of  Geraint,  The,  282-29I 

Mary  Boyle,  To,  501 

Maud,  44,  99,  105,  145,  201,  237-254,  410,  489 

Maurice,  To  the  Rev.  F.  D.,  411,  499 

May  Queen,  The,  19,  82,  91 

Memory,  Ode  to,  63,  64 

Merlin  and  the  Gleam,  74,  488,  502,  506-50S 

Merlin  and  Vivien,  297-312 

Miller's  Daughter,  The,  82,  83,  91,  427 

Milton  {Alcaics),  462 

Morte  d'Arthur,  130-132,  258 

Mystic,  The,  68 

National  Song,  62 

Northern  Cobbler,  The,  436 

Northern  Farmer,    The,  230,  281,  436,  443-444 

Ode  on  the  Death  of  the  Duke  of  Wellington,  231-234 

Ode  to  Memory,  63,  64 

OEnone,  68,  79,  85,  110-121,  488 

(Enone,  The  Death  of,  142-144,  488 

"  Of  old  sat  Freedom,"  40 

Oriana,  64,  65 

Out  of  the  Deep,  4,  449,  453-455 

Palace  of  Art,    The,  65,  8o-8r,  85-90,  409 

Parnassus,  152 

Passing  of  Arthur,  The,  370-391 


Index  515 


Pelleas  and  Ettarre,  336-341 

Poems  of  Two  Brothers,  54,  55,  58 

Poet,  The,  64,  70-72 

Poet's  Song,  The,  109 

Prefatory  Poem  to  my  Brother's  Sonnets,  501 

Princess,  The,  36,  46,  98,  99,  104,  145-187,  270,  410,  458,  489 

Promise  of  May,  The,  9,  29,  463 

Recollections  of  the  Arabian  Nights,  64,  66 

Revenge,  The,  35,  236,  404 

Ring,  The,  461 

Rizpah,  98,  436,  444-447,  461 

Sailor  Boy,  The,  230,  404-405 

Sea  Dreams,  85,  92,  230,  392,  409,  419-425 

Sea  Fairies,  The,  64,  66-68,  123 

Silent  Voices,  The,  501 

Sir  Galahad,  128,  129-130,  258,  458 

Sisters,  The,  392,  459,  461-462 

Sleeping  Beauty,  The,  ('4 

Specimen  of  a  Translatimi  <>{  the  Iliad,  501 

Spinster's  Sweet-arts,  The,  437,  495 

St.  Simeon  Stylites,  105,  106,  294,  497 

St.  Telemachus,  497 

Supposed  Confessions  of  a  Second-rate  Sensinve  Mind,  a6,  61 

"  Sweet  and  low,"   167 

Talking  Oak,  The,  95 
"Tears,  idle  tears,"  164,  165 
"  The  splendour  falls,"  167 
Third  of  Februar)',  The,  231 
Throstle,  The,  502 
Timbuctoo,  56,  58,  63 
Tiresias,  138 

Tithonus,  68,  134-136,  488 
Translations,  492 
To  E,  Fitzgerald,  501 

ToJ.  S..  499 

To  Mary  Boyle    501 


5i6  Index 

To  the  Marquis  of  Dufferiii  ;ind  Ava,  501 

To  the  Rev.  F.  D.  Maurice,  411,  499 

To  Virgil,  492-494 

Two  Voices,  The,  4,  26,  105,  106,  451  «.,  456,  465,  497,  505 

Ulysses,  68,  109,  125-127,  133,  134,  406,  440,  488 

Vastness,  29,  497 

Virgil,  To,  492-494 

Vision  of  Sin,  The,  26,  85,  105-109,  189 

Voice  and  the  Peak,  The,  505 

Voyage  of  Maeldune,    The,  495,  496 

Voyage,  The,  406,  407,  505 

Walking  to  the  Mail,  loi,  393 

Wellington,  Ode  on  the  Death  of  the  Duke  nf,  231-234 

Wreck,  The,  436 

"  You  ask  me  why,  tho'  ill  at  ease,"  40 


BELLES-LETTRES 


BROWNING.  POET  AND  MAN 

A  Survey.  By  Elisabeth  Luther  Gary.  With  25 
illustrations  in  photogravure  and  some  other  illus- 
trations.    Large  8°,  gilt  top  (in  a  box)  $3-75 

"It  is  written  with  taste  and  judgment.  .  .  .  The  book  is  exactly  what  it 
ought  to  be,  and  will  lead  many  to  an  appreciation  of  Browning  who  have  hither- 
to looked  at  the  bulk  of  his  writings  with  disgust.  .  .  .  It  is  beautifully  illus- 
trated, and_  the  paper  and  typography  are  superb.  It  is  an  Edition  de  luxe  that 
every  admirer  of  Browning  should  possess,  being  worthy  in  every  way  of  the 
poet," — Chicago  Evenins,  Post. 

TENNYSON 
His  Homes,  His  Friends,  and  His  Work.    By  Elisabeth 
Luther  Gary.     With   18  illustrations  in  photogra- 
vure  and  some  other  illustrations.       Large  8°,  gilt 
top  (in  a  box) $3-75 

"  The  multitudes  of  admirers  of  Tennyson  in  the  United  States  will  mark  this 
beautiful  volume  as  very  satisfactory'.  The  text  is  clear,  terse,  and  intelligent, 
and  the  matter  admirably  arranged,  while  the  mechanical  work  is  faultless,  with 
art  work  especially  marked  for  excellence." — Chicago  Inter-Ocean. 

THE  ROSSETTIS  :  DANTE  GABRIEL  AND 
CHRISTINA 
By  Elisabeth  Luther  Gary.     With  27  illustrations  in 
photogravure  and  some  other  illustrations.     Large  8°, 
gilt  top  (in  a  box)        .....         $3-75 

"The  story  of  this  life  has  been  told  by  Mr.  Hall  Caine,  Mr.  William  Sharp. 
Mr.  Watts-Dunton  and  Mr.  William  Rossetti,  his  brother,  but  never  quite  so  well 
as  by  Miss  Gary,  who,  thoroughly  conversant  with  all  the  materials  which  their 
writings  furnisn,  has  turned  it  to  better  advantage  than  they  were  capable  of  from 
their  personal  relation  to  its  perple.xing  subject.   — Mail  and  Express. 

PETRARCH 
The  First  Modern  .Scholar  and  Man  of  Letters.  A  Se- 
lection from  his  Correspondence  with  Boccaccio  and 
other  Friends.  Designed  to  illustrate  the  Beginnings 
of  the  Renaissance.  Translated  from  the  original 
Latin  together  with  Historical  Introductions  and 
Notes,  by  James  Harvey  Robinson,  Professor  of 
History  in  Columbia  University,  with  the  Collabor- 
ation of  Henry  Winchester  Rolfe,  sometime  Pro- 
fessor of  Latin  in  Swarthmore  College.  Illustrated. 
8" $2.00 

G.  P.   PUTNAM'S  SONS,    Nfav  York  and  London 


r 


By  R.  DE  MAULDE  LA  CLAVI^RE 


WOMEN  OF  THE  RENAISSANCE 

A   Study    of    Feminism.      Translated   by    George 
Herbert  Ely.     8°.     With  portrait  .   nef,  $.^.50 

"  We  have  only  admiration  to  bestow  upon  this  most  intri- 
cate and  masterly  analysis  of  the  great  feminine  revolution  of 
the  sixteenth  century.  .  .  .  There  are  chapters  that  we  find 
ourselves  wishing  everybody  might  read  ;  the  admirable  essay, 
for  instance,  on  the  '  Embroidery  of  Life,'  and  that  other 
chapter  discussing  the  influence  of  Platonism.  .  .  ." — Athen- 
aum,  London. 

"  Everything  is  so  brightly,  so  captivatingly  important  in 
this  volume,  the  search  into  the  past  has  been  so  well  re- 
warded, the  conclusions  are  so  shrewd  and  clever,  the  subject 
is  so  limitless,  yet  curiously  limited,  that  as  history  or  as  psy- 
chology it  should  gain  a  large  public." — Bookman. 

THE  ART  OF  LHi'E 

Translated   by    George    Herbert    Ely.     8°. 

(By  mail,  $1.85)     ....     net,  $1.75 

There  is  no  one  to  whom  Buffon's  phrase,  Le  style  cat 
I'homme  mime,  may  be  more  justly  applied  than  to  M.  de 
Maulde.  His  work  is  absolutely  himself ;  it  derives  from  his 
original  personality  and  his  wide  and  sure  learning  an  histori- 
cal value  and  a  literary  charm  almost  unique.  He  is  a  wit 
with  the  curiosity  and  patience  of  the  scholar,  and  a  scholar 
with  the  temperament  of  the  artist.  The  sparkle  and  humour 
of  his  conversation  are  crystallised  in  his  letters,  the  charming 
expression  of  a  large  and  generous  nature. 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 
New  York  London 


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